Security Researcher II - AI for Security

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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.

The Microsoft Security AI team is responsible for defending Microsoft and our customers through applied AI innovation. 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. Defending Microsoft’s complex environment provides a unique opportunity to build and evaluate autonomous defense and offense through emerging generative AI capabilities. Microsoft understands and learns from its own defensive and offensive expertise, including via teams like Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center and Microsoft’s Red Team, and has the opportunity to build a unique knowledge graph describing the relationship between risk, investigation, and response. This data, built over Microsoft’s complex digital estate, along with Microsoft AI forms the foundation for innovative solutions to defend Microsoft. We are looking for a Security Researcher II - AI for Security to join our applied science team to reshape how we defend Microsoft. You will leverage LLMs and agentic systems to uncover and operationalize new adversarial and defensive techniques. You will use various approaches, including the analysis of structured and unstructured data such as code repositories, operational and telemetry data, to identify new capabilities, assess design flaws and vulnerabilities, and investigate incidents. You will support LLM-based workflows for alert analysis and breach path identification and closure. For those passionate about making a meaningful impact in the security industry, don’t miss this opportunity to join the team working on the latest AI technology and applicability.

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.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field
  • OR 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection.
• 1+ year experience with Azure, AWS, and GCP environments.
• 1+ years experience with generative AI/LLM/ agentic frameworks.
• 1+ years experience coding with languages such as Python, C#, Python, Go, and PowerShell.
• 1+ years of experience in cybersecurity

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:

• Experience with security data analytics, anomaly detection, knowledge graphs, data processing.
• Experience as a Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst, detection engineer, and/or security analyst.
• Experience with knowledge graphs, incident response, user and entity behavior analytics.
• Ability to simplify and explain complex ideas.

Security Research 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.

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 11, 2025.

#MSFTSecurity #MSECAI #MSecADAPT

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with applied researchers and security experts to leverage AI-driven techniques, including LLMs and agentic systems, to enhance incident response and support autonomous red team campaigns.
• Design and implement, in coordination with researchers and security experts, security data analytic workflows, including anomaly detection and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA).
• Design and execute realistic attack simulations to test and improve methodologies, advancing offensive data analysis and supporting autonomous red team strategies.
• Build and maintain large-scale knowledge graphs and leverage LLMs for representing, reasoning about, and simulating attack paths, threat relationships, and mitigation strategies within Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise environments.
• Champion innovative principles and forward-looking concepts guided by research trends in academia, OSS and industry.
• Cultivate global collaborations with security researchers to exchange knowledge, stay updated on emerging threats, and build partnerships with defensive and offensive security researchers to advance and integrate cutting-edge defensive and offensive security research shared within the community.
• Share knowledge with the community through presentations, publications, and active participation in social media, contributing to the broader information security ecosystem.
• Embody our culture and values