Senior Site Reliability Engineer - CTJ - Top Secret

Are you interested in working on cutting-edge cloud security products Would you like to be part of one of the world’s most advanced cyber-security solutions and protect millions of computers from thousands of active attack attempts, every month  Look no further than the Microsoft Defender engineering team. We are looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer who will be building and delivering cloud solutions to meet the scale that few companies in the industry are required to support. Leveraging state-of-the-art technologies, you will be instrumental in delivering holistic protection within highly sensitive and secure government environments. The Microsoft Defender team is responsible for delivering a constantly evolving set of services and solutions to meet the challenging landscape of our ever-evolving attackers.   

This is a team which provides on-call operational support and improvements to the operational posture of the Microsoft Defender products within US Government clouds. You will operate our production services, and work closely with other engineering teams to ensure services and systems are highly stable, meet performance SLAs, and meet the expectations of internal and external customers and users. 

The Microsoft Defender team is responsible for delivering a constantly evolving set of services and solutions to meet the challenging landscape of our ever-evolving attackers.

Required Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 2+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience. 

Other Requirements 

• Security Clearance Requirements: Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:  
• The successful candidate must have an active U.S. Government Top Secret Security Clearance.   Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination.
• Clearance Verification: This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements. You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment.
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter

Preffered Qualifications

• Doctorate Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 3+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 6+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 8+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, or systems administration OR equivalent experience. 
• 3+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems. 

Site Reliability Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $158,400 - $258,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.

• Ensure 24x7 Service Reliability 
  Act as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) in an on-call rotation, leading incident response and resolution to maintain uptime and performance for Microsoft’s most critical services. 
• Support and Automate Deployments 
  Execute and improve manual operations and deployments for our products, while designing automation to scale and streamline those processes across environments. 
• Build Scalable Systems 
  Develop automation for monitoring, alerting, debugging, and deployment to reduce manual effort and accelerate safe, reliable delivery. 
• Drive Compliance and Security 
  Ensure systems meet Microsoft’s standards for security, privacy, and accessibility, especially when onboarding new technologies. 
• Lead Post-Incident Learning 
  Conduct postmortems, share insights, and implement solutions that prevent recurrence—fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement. 
• Collaborate Across Teams 
  Partner with engineering and product teams to align reliability goals with customer needs and deliver seamless user experiences. 
• Stay Ahead Technically 
  Continuously invest in your technical growth to improve system availability, observability, and performance at scale.