Senior Software Engineer - CTJ - Poly

Are you excited by the opportunity to lead the design, delivery, and security of cloud-scale software that protects some of the world’s most sensitive and mission-critical environments?

As a Senior Software Engineer in Microsoft’s Specialized Cloud team, you will own and drive highly reliable services that underpin internal security platforms and customer-facing cloud offerings. Your work will help safeguard mission-critical environments that require exceptional trust, compliance, resilience, and operational excellence. In this role, you will tackle complex systems, security, and reliability challenges in a fast-paced engineering environment; set technical direction; influence architecture; mentor engineers; and partner across security, operations, program management, and compliance teams to deliver secure, scalable, and resilient cloud services.

• Lead the design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of cloud-scale services and platform components used in security-critical and highly regulated environments.
• Own significant service areas end to end, including architecture, quality, security, reliability, and operational health.
• Partner with security, operations, program management, compliance, and customer-facing teams to deliver integrated solutions across organizational boundaries.
• Mentor engineers through design guidance, code reviews, technical coaching, and modeling strong engineering practices.
• Lead investigations and resolution of complex live-site issues, including root-cause analysis, prevention planning, and operational improvements, and participate in and help mature 24x7 on-call practices, incident response, service health reviews, and safe deployment processes.
• Apply secure-by-design principles throughout the development lifecycle, including threat modeling, defense-in-depth, least privilege, and vulnerability remediation.
• Identify technical risks, drive clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, and deliver pragmatic solutions that balance customer needs, compliance requirements, and engineering excellence.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python 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 Clearance with access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) based on a Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) with Polygraph. Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required pre-offer and post-hire for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate U.S. Government 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.
• Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government Clearance.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale production services, including logging, monitoring, alerting, incident response, reliability, and availability.
• Proven ability to lead technical design, influence architecture, and deliver complex projects across team or organizational boundaries.
• Hands-on experience with modern DevOps systems, including source control, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, safe deployment practices, and code review tools.
• Strong debugging and systems-thinking skills, with the ability to diagnose issues across operating systems, applications, distributed services, and cloud environments.
• Experience with cloud computing fundamentals, virtual machines, networking, identity, service management, and distributed systems.
• Experience with security disciplines such as event collection, monitoring, detection engineering, vulnerability management, threat modeling, or security operations in cloud environments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated ability to align stakeholders, explain tradeoffs, and mentor engineers across multidisciplinary teams.