Principal Applied AI Engineer

Overview
Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end-to-end, simplified solutions. The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft's mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers' heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. Welcome to the applied research arm of Microsoft Security AI (Artificial Intelligence), where we engage in research to create truly differentiating products and services across Microsoft's Security Division. In the 18 months since our organization's founding, we have driven the research behind Microsoft Security Copilot and a suite of both foundational and specialized AI models. Our project portfolio includes a variety of short-to-long-term horizon projects with applications across Microsoft security suite. We are a culture-first organization, and our culture is one of ambition and science together with curiosity and humility. We believe in a future that is brighter and better than the present, and we want to be the ones who make it happen. We believe that customer obsession requires a commitment to investing in new knowledge. Our people are some of the best and brightest scientists and engineers in the world, and we collaborate every day, helping each other grow and break boundaries. But we do this with the humility that comes with the immense challenges of providing cybersecurity to millions of customers. We oversee and coordinate AI investments for Microsoft Security; work with engineering partners to accelerate and scale security research by making AI tools and data more accessible to security researchers; serve as Microsoft Security's central hub for industry and academic partnerships; and drive thought leadership efforts to let the world know about our trailblazing work in security science and AI.

We are looking for a Principal Applied AI Engineer to join a newly created team to reshape how we defend Microsoft using autonomous agents. Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

1. Design methods, tools, and infrastructure to push forward the state of the art in large language models.
2. Define research goals in collaboration with research teams informed by practical engineering concerns.
3. Contribute to experiments, including designing experimental details, writing reusable code, running evaluations, and organizing results.
4. Adapt standard machine learning methods to best exploit modern parallel environments (e.g. distributed clusters, multicore SMP, and GPU).
5. Build industry-leading systems that are highly available, intuitive, scalable, and secure.
6. Own product architecture and collaborate with product managers, designers, researchers, and other engineers to set the technical direction and create software that optimizes for business metrics.
7. Produce highly reliable and performant code with appropriate monitoring and alerting.
8. Conduct design and code reviews to ensure scalability, performance, and alignment with standards and best practices.
9. Follow release management policies to ensure data integrity, compliance, and system stability.
10. Analyze and improve efficiency, scalability, and stability of various system resources.