Principal Security Researcher

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. 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.

Does protecting over 1 billion customers and making the cyber world a better place sound exciting? Do you have what it takes to be part of one of the world's most crucial security monitoring and detection teams? Do you want to innovate and improve how Microsoft transforms learnings from Intel & incidents into actionable detection and automated processes? This may be an opportunity for you.

The security team seeks a motivated, experienced Principal Security Researcher to join our team. We are looking for someone who can dig into hard engineering problems to improve the core fundamentals of our systems, add critical and exciting new features, revolutionize how our engineers work day-to-day, and try new things like bringing the power of machine learning and statistical analysis at scale to solve these and other problems.

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

• Investigate, analyze, and expand upon security research and real incidents to develop durable detection strategies across the entire kill-chain
• Collaborate with multiple product teams to design sensors, implement detection ideas, and validate their effectiveness using a data-driven approach
• Collaborate with data science teams to understand and identify detection gaps, capabilities, assumptions, and improvements
• Be involved in customer conversations in order to identify opportunities, gaps and concerns
• Responsible for the technical design and vision for building the necessary underlying systems to enable query-ability on the massively large, connected graph cloud inventory to serve billions of resources per day to the callers.
• Work directly on security reviews, formidable & complex automation and remediation workflows across multiple antipatterns.
• Engineer mitigations for subcategories of Root-Cause Analysis (RCA) and antipatterns that we observe based on trends.
• Delivers shift-left mitigations that are designed to eliminate/prevent subcategories of Root-Cause Analysis and antipatterns.
• Identify patterns of failure and Root-Cause Analysis through Machine Learning / ArtificiaI Intelligence prediction for components
• Understand the most important subcategories of Root-Cause Analysis and antipatterns observed through ongoing trend analysis.
• Identifying the “top” Root-Cause Analysis and antipattern categories based on trends.
• Identifying representative subcategories for Root-Cause Analysis and antipatterns for which mitigation Research & Development should be pursued.
• Measuring the impact of mitigations that have been implemented in terms of trend data.
• Analyzing Root-Cause Analysis and antipattern trends that are being observed from incidents, red team ops, and internal/external vulnerability reports.
• Collaborate with other researchers, coordinators, and developers to improve the protection capabilities of the products research, design, and develop shift-left mitigations for subcategories of Root-Cause Analysis and antipatterns, such as in the form of static analysis rules, dynamic analysis rules, platform changes, and so on.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• 7+ years experience in software development lifecycle, cloud security, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field
• 5+ years of experience with Security subject matter knowledge, capable of understanding the technical details of Root-Cause Analysis and antipatterns & Researcher Ability to dive into the technical differences and properties of Root-Cause Analysis and antipatterns.
• Working knowledge of cloud service development, static analysis, and CI/CD.
• Understanding of security attack techniques used in real-world scenarios, spanning both large-scale and targeted attacks.
• Experince working with published research and the ability to collaborate across the research community.
• Proficiency in C# / Python / PowerShell development.

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.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, cloud security, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection.
• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.

• Have a good understanding of graph relational database.
• Responsible for optimizing the runtime of the distributed system and the query engine to achieve ambitious performance goals right from the entry point of the cloud to the lowest layer in the architecture and everything in between.
• Experience with Leveraging the standard authorization engine of the cloud for secure access control across the system while not compromising on the performant corpus query-ability scale.

Security Research 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 January 1, 2025

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.

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