Software Engineer II

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.

As a security-focused DevOps team, we are passionate about the big picture and customer impact. We focus on how each individual part of the service offering works and its place in relation to other services to ensure smooth and secure end-user experience with Microsoft’s products and how we can improve every part, every day. We build best-in-class first-party cryptographic services and tooling while we architect, maintain, and troubleshoot end-to-end licensing and signing offerings for our customers. Retaining our security-first posture presents a unique challenge for our team, requiring a skillset beyond typical Software Development, IT, or Security tools, but a fascinating combination of all three. We have an opening for a passionate and experienced Software Engineer II to join our Crypto Services team. This role is pivotal in developing the next generation of cryptographic services. As we continue to deliver cutting-edge solutions for licensing, key management, signing, and more, we need someone who can collaborate with our highly skilled team to design, implement, and maintain mission-critical services at scale.

This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% from home.

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.

Required/Minimum Qualifications 

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years  technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, PowerShell, Java, JavaScript, or Python 
  • OR equivalent experience. 
• 2+ years of experience in building reliable, distributed systems at scale.
• 2+ years of relevant software engineering experience in collaborative development environments such as Azure DevOps, GitHub, etc. in large scale mission critical services where security, compliance, and risk management are key requirements.
• Business level fluency to read, write and speak English.

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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or Preferred 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 Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years  technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Azure or other Cloud-based development and deployment experience, including any of PaaS, IaaS, Serverless, and Container-based solutions.
• Experience working in environments with high standards for physical and logical security which could be work with HSMs and/or similar cloud technologies such as Azure Key Vault and Azure Confidential Computing or competing products.
• Experience in applied cryptography, with a strong understanding of cryptographic algorithms, protocols, and implementations, including knowledge in emerging areas such as post-quantum cryptography.
• Experience with cyber-security best practices.
• Experience working in DevOps and DRI models, as well as Agile methodologies.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

Understand User Requirements 

• Works with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project manager, technical lead) to determine user requirements for a set of features. Begins to leverage a variety of feedback channels to incorporate insights into future designs or solution fixes. Incorporates appropriate continuous feedback loops measuring customer value, usage patterns, and other actionable metrics of value. 

Design 

• Contributes to processes for the architecture of a product/solution feature and helps to create proposals for architecture by testing design hypotheses and helping to refine code plans, with technical leadership from others.  Helps to assure system architecture meets security and compliance requirements and expectations. 
• Creates a clear and articulated plan for testing and assuring quality of solutions, and defines success for outcomes of tests (e.g., unit tests). Adds new tests, removes antiquated tests, and aggregates tests to improve tests in the feature area. Helps to drive efforts for augmenting test cases and ensures that the solution area has good test coverage. Helps to integrate automation features when planning for testing. 
• Contributes to the identification of dependencies, and the development of design documents for a product area with little oversight. Helps to identify other teams and technologies that will be leveraged, how they will interact, and when one's system may provide support to others. Contributes to determinating back-end dependencies associated with product, application, service, or platform functionality for product features. Understands downstream effects of solutions and work provided. Helps to identify areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members and drives coordination. 

Coding 

• Creates and implements code for a product, service, or feature, reusing code as applicable. Writes and learns to create code that is extensible and maintainable. Considers diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability with few defects, and understands when the code is ready to be shared and delivered. Applies coding patterns and best practices to write code. 
• Supports efforts to apply debugging tools and examines logs, telemetry, and other methods to verify assumptions proactively before issues occur and reactively as issues occur for product features. Conducts retrospective debugging of solutions to identify root causes of problems.
• Reviews code of a product feature to assure it meets the team's and Microsoft’s quality standards, is reliable and accurate, and is appropriate for the scale of the product feature. Applies feedback to current and future iterations. Participates in code reviews to ensure coding standards are followed. Considers diagnosability, reliability, and maintainability when reviewing code and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and screens for coding patterns and best practices in reviews. 

Implement 

• Reviews work items to deepen knowledge of product features in partnership with appropriate stakeholders (e.g., project managers) and executes project plans, release plans, and work items. Contributes to efforts to break down larger work items into smaller work items and provides estimation. Escalates any issues that would cause a delay. 
• Conducts and creates experimentation to determine the effectiveness of changes for prototyping and testing features, and applies findings back into development. 
• Learns about and supports deployment to customers following the correct measures to push features out to customers. Learns about and considers the impact of build deployments on both users and other services. Learns about best practices for the deployment of features safely. 

Reliability and Supportability 

• Maintains operations of live service as issues arise on a rotational, on-call basis. Identifies solutions and mitigations to simple issues and complex issues when applicable impacting performance or functionality of Live Site services and escalates as necessary. 
• Acts as a Designated Responsible Individual (DRI) working on call to monitor system/product feature/service for degradation, downtime, or interruptions. Alerts stakeholders as to the status and gains approval to restore system/product/service for simple problems. Responds within Service Level Agreement (SLA) timeframe. Escalates issues to appropriate owners.
• Identifies areas to efforts to integrate instrumentation for gathering telemetry data on system behavior such as performance, reliability, availability, usage, and safety mechanisms. Contributes to sustaining feedback loops from telemetry resulting in subsequent designs. Helps to create outputs of telemetry such as notifications or dashboards. 
• Contributes to efforts to collect, classify, and analyze data with little oversight on a range of metrics (e.g., health of the system, where bugs might be occurring). Contributes to the refinement of product features by escalating findings from analyses to inform decisions regarding the engineering of products. 

Engineering Excellence 

• Builds knowledge, shares new ideas, and shares pinpoints of engineering tool gaps to improve software developer tools to support other programs, tools, and applications to create, debug, and maintain code for complex product features. Uses open source when possible. Develops higher-level awareness of other kinds of tools outside areas of expertise. Helps to identify internal tools and creates tools that will be useful for creating the product, determining if methods are still applicable for the current solution. 
• Contributes to the development of automation within production and deployment of a complex product feature. Runs code in simulated, or other non-production environments to confirm functionality and error-free runtime for products with little to no oversight. 
• Contributes to efforts to ensure the correct processes are followed to achieve a high degree of security, privacy, safety, and accessibility. Checks for visible evidence to demonstrate compliance for product areas. Develops and holds an understanding of the implications of onboarding new technologies following expectations of compliance at Microsoft. 
• Remains current in skills by investing time and effort into staying abreast of current developments that will improve the availability, reliability, efficiency, observability, and performance of products while also driving consistency in monitoring and operations at scale. 
• Applies best practices to reliably build code that is based on well-established methods while also applying best practices for new code development. Demonstrates and maintains an up-to-date understanding of both global and local regulations for technologies and system applications to ensure regulations are met. Follows best practices for product development and scaling to customer requirements, and applies best practices for meeting scaling needs and performance expectations. 
• Maintains communication with key partners across the Microsoft ecosystem of engineers. Considers partners across teams and their end goals for products to drive and achieve desirable user experiences and fitting the dynamic needs of partners/customers through product development. 

Other 

• Embody our culture and values