Senior Security Researcher

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.

The Generalized AI Agents team is at the forefront of AI innovation, driving cutting-edge research and development across deep learning, natural language processing, large language models (LLMs/GPT), reinforcement learning (RL), and graph-based models. We specialize in pioneering advanced agentic solutions, including state-of-the-art AI innovations with RL fine-tuning of LLMs, to build intelligent systems that adapt, reason, and act autonomously. Our mission is to anticipate future technological needs and seamlessly integrate transformative AI capabilities into our product ecosystem—delivering solutions that not only meet today’s challenges but also lay the foundation for the next generation of applied AI and data science.

We are looking for a Senior Security Researcher who is passionate about the latest AI advancements, and is willing to take on variety of challenges in developing advanced AI solutions for security scenarios, including privacy-aware data curation, rigorous AI agent evaluation and validation, continual pretraining, task-focused fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. The role is designed to be closely partnering with applied researchers and engineers to translate innovations into deployed products while keeping business results in mind. Enabling such projects requires strong security analytical skills, dynamic coding capabilities, ability to reason over complex cybersecurity threat scenarios, drive to stay on top of emerging threats, and being detail oriented from security researcher. We invest in the health of our team and our team culture as significant components that are impacting delivery of our projects to customers and partners.

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

• Apply diagnostic expertise for multiple workstreams and provide guidance to applied researchers and engineers throughout the lifecycle of every component of a complex AI system including feedback for AI agent reasoning.
• Use business knowledge and technical expertise to assist with analyzing the work of the team to identify potential tools to assist detecting future vulnerability and threat analyses.
• Use subject matter expertise to identify and prioritize potential security issues, tools, mitigations, and processes, and stays current in knowledge as security landscape evolves.
• Coaches and mentors others in area of expertise.
• Oversees and guides manual grading efforts for AI agent outputs, synthetic data generation efforts, and other data sets.
• Define and evaluate metrics for success so the team stays on track and maintains a high-quality bar.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.
• OR 5+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection.
• 5+ years of experience in cybersecurity, anomaly detection, risk assessment, threat intelligence, malware/intrusion detection, pen-testing, malware/intrusion detection, ML/AI modeling, software development lifecycle.
• Cross-group and interpersonal skills, with the ability to articulate solutions.

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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.
• OR 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection.

Security Research 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   

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 30, 2025. 

#MSFTSecurity #MSECAI #MicrosoftSecurity #AgenticAI #AIML #ThreatIntelligence