Software Engineer II - CTJ - Top Secret

Company: Microsoft
Location: Reston
Posted on: February 26, 2026

Job Description:

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. Are you interested in working for on cutting-edge cloud security products? Would you like to be part of one of the world’s most advanced cyber-security solutions and protect millions of computers from thousands of active attack attempts, every month? Look no further than the Microsoft Defender engineering team. You will be building and delivering cloud solutions to meet the scale that few companies in the industry are required to support. Leveraging state-of-the-art technologies, you will be instrumental in delivering holistic protection within government environments. The Microsoft Defender team is responsible for delivering a constantly evolving set of services and solutions to meet the challenging landscape of our ever-evolving attackers. This is a combined DevOps team which provides leadership, direction, and accountability for cloud design, service architecture, engineering infrastructure, and data platform development. We are currently looking for Software Engineer II to join the team. You will help conduct business reviews and operate our production services. Collaboration skills will be required to work closely with other engineering teams to ensure services and systems are highly stable, meet performance Service level agreements (SLA), and meet the expectations of internal and external customers and 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 andcollaborate 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 The team provides leadership, direction and accountability for application architecture, Cloud design, Infrastructure development and end to end implementation for our Sovereign and Government Clouds. Demonstrated collaboration skills will be required to work closely with other engineering teams to ensure services/systems are highly stable and performant and meet the expectations of internal and external customers and users. Core Responsibilities: Build and improve services to be scalable and highly reliable. Help deliver and improve engineering systems and practices to deliver services in complex cloud environments. Contribute to design and automate service scale features and customer requirements. Investigate pre-production and production issues, implement, and deploy fixes. Participate in an on-call rotation (typically 24/7 for one week every 6-8 weeks) within a secure facility. Other: Embody our Culture and Values Qualifications Required /Minimum Qualifications: Bachelors 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. Other Requirements: Security Clearance Requirements: Candidates must be able 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: Candidates must have an active TS and be willing to upgrade to TS/SCI (with polygraph) or have an active TS/SCI and be willing to upgrade to TS/SCI (with polygraph). This role will require candidates to maintain the TS/SCI (with polygraph) clearance. Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination. Clearance Verification: This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements. You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment. Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. Additional / Preferred qualifications: Understanding and experience with CI/CD concepts and Git. 2 years of Windows / Linux hands on system experiences Experience debugging issues ranging from the operating system, application, and all the way to the cloud. Experienced in solving operational issues in a scalable way. Ability to thrive with the ambiguity associated with working in a fast-paced and changing environment. Support a 24x7 live site support model for the services the team owns. Experience with Kubernetes, and the Kubernetes satellite technologies Some experience with building and supporting large-scale production services, including logging, monitoring, alerting, and measuring reliability and availability. Proficient in at least one scripting language but knows when to move solutions into managed code. Experiece with Azure DevOps and GitHub tooling. Demonstrated communication skills and ability to collaborate in a multi-disciplinary team consisting of Software Engineers, Program Managers, Security Researchers, and Data Scientists. Software Engineering IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $100,600 - $199,000 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 $131,400 - $215,400 per year.

Keywords: Microsoft, Sterling , Software Engineer II - CTJ - Top Secret, IT / Software / Systems , Reston, Virginia