Principal Architect

Overview

Security represents one of the most critical priorities for our customers in a world of evolving digital threats, increasing regulatory requirements, growing estate complexity, and rapid advances in AI. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place by empowering every user, customer, and developer with integrated security solutions that protect across heterogeneous environments.

Perception is an advanced Agentic AI platform designed to empower security and IT teams to operate at the speed and scale of AI while adhering to Microsoft's responsible AI principles.

We are looking for a Principal Architect to define and drive the architectural vision and long-term technical strategy for the Perception Platform, with a particular focus on enabling AI platform capabilities to operate securely, reliably, and at scale across multiple tenants and diverse enterprise environments.

In this role, you will provide architectural leadership across complex and interconnected areas spanning Generative AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), memory, reasoning, agentic and multi-agent systems, identity and authorization, AI safety, distributed cloud systems, and platform infrastructure.

You will define reference architectures, architectural principles, system boundaries, integration patterns, and reusable platform abstractions that enable sophisticated AI capabilities to support different tenant configurations, infrastructure dependencies, security boundaries, identity and authorization requirements, compliance constraints, and deployment models.

You will drive architectural strategy for reducing tenant-specific coupling and enabling capabilities to be deployed, configured, validated, monitored, and operated consistently across enterprise environments. This includes guiding the evolution of existing production architectures while establishing common architectural patterns for identity, compute, storage, networking, configuration, deployment, observability, reliability, security, data, and AI execution.

This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud architecture, strong judgment across complex architectural tradeoffs, a deep understanding of modern AI systems, and the ability to influence technical direction across organizational boundaries. You will partner with engineering leaders, product managers, architects, security experts, privacy and compliance teams, and partner organizations to translate complex customer, product, security, and platform requirements into scalable architectures and long-term technology investments.

As a Principal Architect, you will be expected to identify systemic architectural challenges, establish long-term technical direction, drive architectural convergence across teams and services, define durable architectural principles and reference patterns, and create technical leverage that extends beyond any individual product, component, or organization.

You will serve as a technical authority for critical architectural decisions, helping teams navigate tradeoffs involving security, reliability, scalability, extensibility, operational complexity, customer requirements, and long-term platform evolution.

This is an opportunity to solve some of the most challenging architecture problems at the intersection of AI, security, distributed systems, identity, and multi-tenant cloud architecture, while helping establish the technical foundation for delivering Microsoft Security AI capabilities securely and consistently to customers at scale.

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

• Define the architectural vision and long-term technical strategy for the Perception Platform, establishing principles and reference architectures for production-grade AI capabilities spanning generative AI, retrieval, memory, reasoning, agent orchestration, model interaction, execution, evaluation, extensibility, security, and safety.
• Define scalable multi-tenant reference architectures that enable platform capabilities to operate securely and reliably across multiple tenants and enterprise environments, establishing clear patterns for tenant isolation, identity boundaries, authorization, configuration, data protection, deployment, sovereignty, compliance, and operations.
• Establish architectural principles, system boundaries, and reusable platform abstractions across compute, storage, networking, identity, configuration, deployment, observability, data, AI execution, and service integration that reduce architectural fragmentation and tenant-specific coupling.
• Drive architectural convergence across distributed systems and engineering teams, identifying divergent implementations and establishing common patterns, interfaces, contracts, and platform capabilities where standardization creates meaningful engineering and operational leverage.
• Define an automation-first architecture for tenant provisioning, configuration, deployment, validation, upgrades, migrations, lifecycle management, and operational readiness, enabling consistent operation across heterogeneous tenant environments.
• Define architectural approaches that accommodate variations in tenant configuration, service availability, infrastructure topology, networking, identity, security, data residency, sovereignty, and compliance requirements without propagating environment-specific assumptions throughout the application architecture.
• Establish architectural strategy for scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, including ingestion, indexing, embeddings, semantic and hybrid retrieval, context construction, grounding, provenance, re-ranking, retrieval evaluation, data governance, and enforcement of tenant and authorization boundaries throughout retrieval workflows.
• Define reference architecture and architectural principles for agentic and multi-agent AI systems, including planning, reasoning, tool use, task decomposition, delegation, collaboration, state and memory management, human-in-the-loop patterns, failure recovery, bounded autonomous execution, and communication between agents and services.
• Define architecture for identity, authentication, and authorization across AI and agentic systems, including user, workload, service, and agent identities; Role-Based Access Control (RBAC); delegated authorization; least-privilege access; scoped permissions; and secure propagation of identity and authorization context across distributed workflows.
• Establish architectural guardrails that ensure tenant isolation and authorization are preserved end-to-end across retrieval, reasoning, planning, memory, and execution, including mechanisms for validating agent-generated plans and tool interactions against applicable security, authorization, safety, privacy, and compliance policies.
• Define architecture for AI safety, security, and trust boundaries, including defense-in-depth approaches for prompt injection, unsafe tool invocation, cross-tenant information exposure, untrusted content, data provenance, policy enforcement, and secure interaction between models, agents, tools, services, and enterprise data.
• Establish architectural approaches for AI memory and state management, including short-term and long-term memory, tenant and user isolation, authorization-aware retrieval, lifecycle management, retention, deletion, provenance, privacy, compliance, and safe reuse of contextual information.
• Define architectural expectations for automated validation, testing, and architectural conformance, ensuring functional correctness, tenant isolation, authorization, security, reliability, deployment readiness, and compatibility across heterogeneous environments.
• Establish observability, monitoring, diagnostics, and operational architecture that enables engineering teams to understand end-to-end platform health, identify systemic failures, distinguish platform-wide from tenant-specific issues, and efficiently troubleshoot distributed services and AI workflows.
• Define architectural strategies for resilience, scale, capacity, dependency management, graceful degradation, disaster recovery, and failure isolation across globally distributed AI and cloud services.
• Identify systemic architectural dependencies and drive the evolution of existing production systems toward modular, configurable, reusable, secure, and scalable platform architectures while balancing long-term architectural direction with practical migration strategies.
• Lead architecture reviews for critical platform investments and provide technical guidance on build-versus-reuse decisions, service boundaries, data and API contracts, technology selection, cross-service dependencies, and architectural tradeoffs.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to translate customer and business requirements into long-term architectural roadmaps and strategic technology investments, identifying where foundational platform capabilities are required to support future scenarios.
• Influence architecture beyond the immediate team, partnering with architects and engineering leaders across Microsoft Security and related platform organizations to align architectural direction, establish reusable patterns, and prevent unnecessary duplication or fragmentation.
• Mentor and develop senior engineers and architects, raise architectural capability across the organization, and create a culture of rigorous design, technical depth, engineering excellence, and long-term systems thinking.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience designing and building complex software systems, distributed systems, cloud platforms,
• OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements: Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements is 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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Masters Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience designing and building complex software systems, distributed systems, or cloud platforms

• OR Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience designing and building complex software systems, distributed systems, or cloud platforms

• OR equivalent experience.

• Significant experience architecting large-scale distributed systems, multi-tenant services, enterprise platforms, cloud infrastructure, or AI-powered systems in production environments.

• Experience establishing reference architectures, architectural principles, platform standards, system boundaries, and reusable architectural patterns across multiple engineering teams or organizations.

• Experience designing architectures with strong tenant isolation across identity, authorization, data, compute, configuration, networking, and operational boundaries.

• Experience defining architecture for Generative AI systems, including model orchestration, RAG, semantic retrieval, memory, context management, reasoning, tool use, evaluation, grounding, safety, and production operationalization.

• Experience architecting agentic or multi-agent systems, including planning, tool invocation, task orchestration, memory, state management, delegation, agent-to-agent or agent-to-service communication, policy enforcement, and bounded autonomous execution.

• Deep understanding of identity, authentication, authorization, RBAC, least privilege, delegated authorization, workload identities, service identities, agent identities, and multi-tenant security boundaries.

• Experience defining secure architectural patterns for integrating AI systems with enterprise data, services, APIs, plugins, tools, and distributed execution environments.

• Experience designing Retrieval-Augmented Generation architectures, including ingestion, indexing, embeddings, retrieval, re-ranking, provenance, grounding, authorization-aware retrieval, and evaluation.

• Experience with modern cloud architecture, including Kubernetes, containerized services, compute, storage, networking, service-to-service communication, configuration management, Infrastructure as Code, automated deployment, and CI/CD.

• Experience architecting highly available and resilient services, including approaches for dependency failure, capacity constraints, throttling, graceful degradation, fault isolation, recovery, and disaster scenarios.

• Experience defining observability, diagnostics, health monitoring, deployment validation, and operational architecture for large-scale distributed systems.

• Experience identifying architectural coupling and successfully evolving existing production systems toward modular, reusable, configurable, extensible, and scalable platform architectures.

• Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs involving security, reliability, scalability, performance, cost, operational complexity, developer productivity, and time-to-market.

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy and align engineering organizations around common architectural direction without requiring direct organizational authority.

• Strong technical communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex architectures and tradeoffs clearly to engineering teams, architects, product leaders, security experts, and senior leadership.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior technical leaders and raise architectural and engineering capabilities across an organization.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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

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.