Senior Security Researcher
Microsoft
Senior Security Researcher
Multiple Locations, United States
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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.
We are seeking an experienced Senior Security Researcher with the right blend of creativity, tenacity, data savviness, and technical skills to help us protect the hundreds of millions of customers that rely on our email service every day. In this role, you’ll have the flexibility to incubate and test new ideas and technologies into prototypes, and for that reason a background in email security and programming experience are recommended. You will also proactively research, investigate, and mitigate the latest spam and phishing campaigns; conduct deep research and experimentation on new durable protection strategies; and collaborate with a diverse team of data scientists, researchers, engineers, and product managers to protect a global customer base.
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.
Qualifications
Required/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.
- 3+ years of experience investigating and responding to security incidents originating from the web or email
- 3+ years of experience querying and analyzing large datasets (e.g. SQL, Python, KQL/Azure Data Explorer, Excel, PowerBI, etc.)
- Willingness to cover a periodic on-call rotation for the team.
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.
- 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.
- Yara, RegEx, or comparable rule-writing experience
- Insatiable curiosity to learn about attacker patterns and behaviors, with a drive to build innovative detections and protections.
- Understand the cyber kill chain, especially attack scenarios originating from email or web sites.
- Understand email headers, email/web security protocols, and related analysis tools.
- Experience responding to customer escalations and reporting investigative findings.
- Programming / software development lifecycle experience
- Experience with sandbox technologies and malware analysis
- Experience working through ambiguity to drive innovations in detections, monitoring, and internal team processes.
- Solid understanding of attacker tradecraft associated with email and web-based threats.
- Broad, general, familiarity with the threat landscape affecting our customers.
- Experience building automated reports, alerting, workflows, and/or business intelligence solutions (PowerBI).
- Ability to use data to “tell a story” and influence decision-making.
- Experience creating, using, or contributing to the development and validation of machine learning models.
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 July 22, 2025.
#MSFTSecurity #EmailSecurity , #SecurityResearch
Responsibilities
- Prototyping new approaches to improve detections, create or augment intelligence workflows, and/or streamline security operations; to include experimentation, testing, and deploying your own POCs while also working cross-functionally to support team-wide and organization-wide innovation projects.
- Responding to escalations to resolve detection effectiveness issues (misclassified spam/phish and false positives) Authoring rules and creating new ML features to thwart evolving email-based attacks.
- Conducting deep research on attacker campaigns and techniques to support durable detection investments and improve customer experience.
- Engaging and collaborating with diverse partner teams to drive great customer experiences and ensure holistic protection across the Microsoft Security stack.