Principal Applied Scientist

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 (Artificial Intelligence) Research 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 through emerging generative AI capabilities. Microsoft understands and learns from its own defensive expertise, including via teams like Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), 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 seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to join our team, focused on conducting deep research in knowledge graphs to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLM (Large Language Models)-based autonomous agents during security investigations. You will also play a crucial role in generating synthetic data and environments, creating realistic representations of attack scenarios. This synthetic generation will serve as a foundation for building a framework to train and evaluate agentic capabilities across various security scenarios.

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

• Conduct in-depth research on knowledge graphs to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLM-based autonomous agents, contributing to more effective security investigations.
• Design and implement synthetic data generation techniques to create realistic representations of attack scenarios, supporting the training and evaluation of autonomous agents.
• Build and refine frameworks that enable the evaluation of agentic capabilities across various security scenarios, supporting the creation of an agentic playground for red vs. blue operations with autonomous agents to enhance testing and effectiveness.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate insights from security investigations into the development of agentic workflows, enhancing the overall security platform.
• Share knowledge with the community through engaging presentations, blog posts, papers, and active participation on social media channels, contributing to the broader information security ecosystem.
• Develop open-source tools for the community, enabling access to our research and best practices, fostering knowledge sharing, and empowering others to conduct their own experiments and learn from our threat research methodology.

Other

• Embody our Culture and Values

Qualifications

Qualifications - Required:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) 

  •  OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) 

  •  OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)

  • 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.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• 4+ years of experience in research areas such as generative AI/ agentic frameworks, large language models, risk quantification, anomaly detection, clustering, statistics, time series analysis, reinforcement learning, or graph algorithms.
• Expereince in Knowledge Graphs applied to security.
• Expereince generating synthetic data and environment to trains LLM-based AI agents.
• Experience in safety and ethical aspects of AI.
• Experience in technology transfer of applied research. Experience conducting high-quality research and publishing.
• Experience in working with large-scale datasets.
• Experience in applying machine learning to security and safety domains, such as malware detection, fraud prevention, or cyber-physical systems. Background in cyber security including knowledge of adversary tradecraft, emerging threats, or SOC operations.

Applied Sciences IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $137,600 - $267,000 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 $180,400 - $294,000 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 21, 2024.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

#MSFTSecurity #MSECAIR #Cybersecurity #InfoSecCommunity #SecurityResearch #LLM #AI #KnowledgeGraph #AIAgents #GenAI #MSecADAPT #SHPE24MSFT