Principal Security Researcher

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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.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) is a product for preventative protection, post-breach detection, automated investigation, and response. Our team, the core machine learning and data science team, is responsible for building ML, LLM, and automation solutions that defend over a billion end users and enterprises from cybersecurity attacks through Microsoft Defender AntiVirus, Microsoft Defender Endpoint Detection and Response, and Network Protection products. We are a mix of machine learning engineers and security researchers who investigate attacks, develop big data pipelines, run experiments, and deploy our protection to production to protect customers at scale.

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.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.
  • OR 7+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection.
• 2+ years of experience with coding.
• 1+ years of experience with language models or machine learning.
• 1+ years leading security initiatives and publishing research.
• 1+ years mentoring and guiding researchers.

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 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection.
• 1+ years experience with OS internals, hypervisors, and cloud security architectures.
• Experience in classical and deep learning machine learning methods.

Security Research IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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 November 20, 2025.

#cybersecurity #machine-learning #ml #ai #llm #MSFTSECURITY

• Investigate, analyze, and learn from ongoing cybersecurity attacks in order to develop durable detection and prevention solution/strategies across the kill-chain or product/OS enhancements. Shares and leads within team. As part of this you will primarily be running telemetry-based attack investigations and threat hunting mixed with light reverse-engineering.
• Design, code, and maintain client-side and cloud machine learning and automation systems that powers cybersecurity protection in our products and services.
• Experiment with and apply large language models and agentic systems to protect our customers and improve our internal systems.
• Support the management of incidents by applying technical knowledge to diagnose and triage issues with a commitment to maintaining the quality of products and services. Takes notes during incidents and participates in postmortem and root-cause analysis processes.
• Work with other internal and external teams to forge new and improve existing partnerships that help mature the product.