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.

Content Protection and Licensing (CPL) builds and operates the core platforms that protect Microsoft’s products, customers, and digital ecosystem at global scale. As a Senior Software Engineer on CPL, you will design, build, and operate highly reliable, secure, and compliant distributed systems that power product activation, licensing, entitlement enforcement, and abuse prevention across Windows, Xbox, and cloud‑connected experiences. You’ll work at the intersection of distributed systems, security, cryptography, and business policy—owning critical components end‑to‑end, driving technical design, improving system resilience, and partnering closely with security, legal, and business stakeholders to translate complex requirements into scalable, auditable solutions. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy deep technical ownership, mentoring others, and solving high‑impact problems that safeguard trust and platform integrity for billions of users.

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:

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate mission‑critical, highly available services that power licensing, activation, and entitlement enforcement across Microsoft experiences, with strong focus on reliability, security, and compliance.
• Lead technical design and implementation across feature areas—driving robust architectures, making sound tradeoffs, and raising the engineering bar through reviews, best practices, and measurable quality improvements.
• Own service health end‑to‑end by building deep telemetry, monitoring, and alerting; diagnosing production issues; and driving durable fixes that improve performance, resiliency, and customer experience.
• Collaborate across disciplines and partner teams (engineering, security, program management) to translate complex business and policy requirements into scalable, auditable engineering deliverables.
• Mentor and uplift others supporting a healthy, inclusive engineering culture by coaching peers, unblocking teammates, and amplifying team effectiveness and execution.

Qualifications:

Required/minimum 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 PythonOR equivalent experience.

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, Engineering, or related technical field AND 8+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in one or more languages including, but not limited to, C#, C++, Java, or Python.
• 5+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large‑scale, distributed systems in a production environment.
• 5+ years of experience in design and implementation of end‑to‑end features, including architecture, development, testing, deployment, and operational readiness.
• 3+ years of experience building and operating cloud‑based services (Azure or equivalent), including service reliability, monitoring, and incident response.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• 3+ years of experience building or operating security‑sensitive or trust‑critical services, such as licensing, entitlement, identity, payments, or abuse prevention systems.
• 2+ years of experience in Application development using AI tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cline, Roo etc.
• Familiarity with cryptography concepts, certificates, PKI, or secure key management (practical experience preferred but not required).
• Experience working in high‑availability, compliance‑driven environments, including production services with audit or regulatory requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively across teams, time-zones and disciplines to deliver high‑quality engineering solutions
• 3+ years of experience managing service health, including telemetry, monitoring, root‑cause analysis, and long‑term reliability improvements.
• Experience mentoring engineers, contributing to design reviews, and raising the overall engineering quality bar.

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $158,400 - $258,000 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.