Principal Software Engineering Manager - Microsoft Red Team
Software Engineering, Other Engineering
Illinois, USA
The Cloud & AI 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. Microsoft is one of the largest enterprise service companies in the world.
The Microsoft Red Team attacks ALL Microsoft services, continually – identifying critical, systemic risks, demonstrating authentic attack chains and techniques, and working with engineering teams, investigators, and incident responders to continuously improve their ability to protect, detect, investigate, and respond to real attacks.
Within the Microsoft Red Team engineering group, the ILDC (Microsoft Israel Development Center) engineering team owns the Initial Access pillar – the tooling and services that give Microsoft's red team its first foothold against the company's own estate. The team builds AI-driven vulnerability discovery capabilities that hunt for exploitable weaknesses at Microsoft scale, develops the initial access tooling used by human red team operators in live operations, and contributes to the broader AI-driven adversary emulation platform that we use to protect Microsoft. The team collaborates closely with U.S.-based Red Team engineers and operators, bringing together deep expertise in offensive security, autonomous agents, and generative models to stay ahead of AI-enabled adversaries. Defending one of the world's most diverse enterprise environments offers an unparalleled opportunity to build, deploy, and assess offensive capabilities using cutting-edge AI techniques.
As a Principal Software Engineering Manager in the Microsoft Red Team, you will lead and grow this engineering team in ILDC. You will own the technical strategy and delivery for the Initial Access pillar, shape a charter that is actively expanding into new offensive capability areas, and build a high-performing team that ships production-grade security tooling with real operational impact. You will partner with red team operators, security researchers, and engineering leaders across geographies to ensure Microsoft continues to see itself the way its most sophisticated adversaries do.
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.
In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.
Responsibilities
• Lead, grow, and coach a team of software engineers, building an inclusive, high-trust culture where people do the best work of their careers.
• Own the technical strategy, roadmap, and execution for the Initial Access pillar within Microsoft Red Team engineering, and expand the team's charter into new offensive capability areas as opportunities emerge.
• Drive the design and delivery of AI-driven vulnerability discovery services that leverage LLMs and autonomous agents to find exploitable weaknesses across Microsoft's estate at scale.
• Deliver and operate the initial access tooling that human red team operators depend on in live engagements, holding a high bar for reliability, tradecraft, and operational security.
• Contribute engineering leadership to the broader AI-driven adversary emulation platform, partnering with peer engineering teams globally on architecture and shared components.
• Partner closely with red team operators, security researchers, product management, and engineering leaders across the U.S. and ILDC to align investments with the highest-impact attack paths.
• Hire, develop, and retain great engineers; set clear expectations, give candid feedback, and grow the next generation of technical leaders on the team.
• Drive engineering excellence across the team – design reviews, code quality, secure development practices, live-site health, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure Microsoft continues to improve security through authentic red team attacks.
Qualifications
Our team focuses on diversity of all types in candidates, and we strive to hire people with different experiences and perspectives. To that end, we know that no candidate has every desired skill and experience, but together we make a strong, effective team.
- You bring 10+ years of professional hands-on software development experience, with a track record of shipping and operating production systems.
- You bring 3+ years of people management experience leading software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
- Experience building software in the cybersecurity domain – e.g., red team / offensive tooling, endpoint or cloud security products, detection and response, threat protection, or closely adjacent security engineering.
- Excellent cross-functional and cross-geo collaboration skills; ability to influence without authority across operators, researchers, and partner engineering teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- You bring a B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience
- Demonstrated ability to set direction in ambiguous, unsolved problem spaces and translate strategy into execution that delivers measurable impact.
- Experience with offensive security – red teaming, penetration testing, malware/tooling development, or offensive cyber operations.
- Experience with applications that leverage LLMs or autonomous agents – whether hands-on or through leading teams that build them (agentic architectures, prompt engineering, evaluation, or integrating generative AI into production or research systems).
- Experience leading teams through growth or charter expansion, and developing engineers into senior and principal contributors.
- Familiarity with the modern attacker kill chain, MITRE ATT&CK, and adversary tradecraft against cloud and AI environments.
Other Requirements
-Ability 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:
-Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.