Senior Security Researcher
Microsoft
The Cloud & AI 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 is one of the largest enterprise service companies in the world.
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 Intelligence Graph Research team within Microsoft CTO organization is responsible for defending Microsoft Cloud and our customers through innovation in security graph research and abuse identification. Defending Microsoft Coud’s complex environment provides a unique opportunity to research, build and evaluate autonomous graph powered defense through emerging generative AI capabilities.
We’re looking for a Senior Security Researcher to help us detect and disrupt real-world threats at cloud scale. You’ll build novel anomaly detections over vast Azure, Entra, and bespoke telemetry; convert detections into production-grade machine learning (ML) models; and develop security agents that reduce response fatigue during long-running investigations. You’ll work deeply with a security graph that connects identity, resources, activity, and risk to accelerate investigations and drive high-signal outcomes. This role blends threat research, data science, and applied engineering: you’ll prototype quickly, validate with evidence, and deliver scalable systems that materially improve detection, triage, and investigation speed.
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
Build cloud-scale anomaly detections:
- Design and implement high-signal anomaly detectors across Azure/Entra and custom log sources (control plane, data plane, identity/auth, app activity, Graph API, Key Vault, storage, etc.).
- Create detection funnels that reduce noise while preserving true positives, with measurable improvements in alert quality and investigation time.
- Develop baselines and “pattern-of-life” models for identities, service principals, applications, tenants, and infrastructure.
Convert detections into ML models and scalable pipelines:
- Translate research detections into ML approaches (supervised, weakly-supervised, semi-supervised, anomaly detection) and deploy them into reliable pipelines.
- Engineer features at scale (time-series aggregates, behavior fingerprints, graph-derived features, sequence features) and evaluate performance with rigorous metrics (precision/recall, alert volume, time-to-triage, drift).
- Own end-to-end lifecycle from hypothesis to productionization
Qualifications
- Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
- OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
- OR 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.
- 8+ years of experience in security research, detection engineering, threat hunting, incident response, or applied security data science (or equivalent depth of expertise).
- 3+ years of experience in Azure and Entra security concepts: authentication flows, service principals/app registrations, permissions/consents, conditional access, role assignments, tokens, workload identities, and common abuse paths.
- 3+ years building anomaly detections over large-scale telemetry, including Baselines, time-series aggregates, and behavioral modeling, High-volume log analytics and query optimization (e.g., KQL/ADX or equivalent), Designing alert funnels and triage logic to reduce noise.
- 3+ years in experience in applied ML skills for security problems: Feature engineering, model selection, evaluation design, drift monitoring, Experience shipping ML or statistical detection into production systems.
- 3+ years in experience in Python/C# (data pipelines, modeling, production code quality), distributed processing (e.g., Spark/Databricks/Flink) and large datasets (Parquet/data lakes).
- 1+ years experience with **graph analytics** for security use cases (attack paths, entity resolution, graph embeddings, community detection, anomaly scoring) and/or graph databases (Neo4j or similar).
- 1+ years experience building or operationalizing **LLM-powered or agentic** investigation systems: Tool-driven agents, retrieval, memory, prompt/eval harnesses, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop workflow.
- 1+ years with Microsoft cloud security telemetry sources such as: Entra sign-in/audit logs, app consent events, Azure activity logs, Key Vault diagnostics, storage access logs, Graph API activity, etc.
- 1+ years experience designing scalable detection systems: streaming pipelines, batch + near-real-time architectures, and reliability/observability.
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
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.