Senior Research Data and Service Engineer

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 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 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 Senior Research Data and Service Engineer to join our applied science team to reshape how we defend Microsoft. You will establish and build processes and structures to empower research scenarios: from data engineering, construction of training data sets, creation of new telemetry sources, building of knowledge graphs, scalable infrastructure, and creation of agentic AI systems or new security-focused language models. You would be responsible for working together with applied scientists to develop systems to solve real-world scenarios and challenges. 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. 

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

• Acts as enablers to research and applied scientists by creating infrastructure, services, and data pipelines using cloud technologies.
• You will build code to extract raw data, strategize approaches to validate its quality, and ensure the correct data is ingested across the pipeline. You’ll also help develop techniques to transform raw data into forms compatible with downstream data sources.
• Collaborate with researchers on the design, development, execution, and implementation of technology research projects that serve Microsoft Defenders.
• Facilitate the quality of prototypes through data visualization, monitoring, and alerting pipelines.
• Research and develop an understanding of tools, technologies, and methods being used in the community that can be utilized to improve product quality, performance, or efficiency.
• Incorporate state-of-the-art research or previously tested solutions occurring at Microsoft and academia and tune it to solve complex security challenges.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling or data engineering work
  • OR Master's Degree in Computer Science, Math, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years experience in business analytics, data science, software development, data modeling or data engineering work
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of experience building, scaling and operating cloud services in Azure, AWS, or GCP.

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

• 2+ years of relevant industry experience driving cutting-edge research into real world impact.
• 2+ years or experience working with large-scale data processing tools
• Previous experience with code contributions to products and/or open-source projects.
• Demonstrated technical competencies with large-scale data processing and distributed compute tools such as Cosmos, Azure Data Explorer, Kusto, Azure Data Factory, Azure AML pipelines, Spark, Synape, or Dask.
• Experience with building and deploying services on Azure including Azure Functions, Azure Containers, Azure DevOps pipelines, Github actions, Github Codespaces, and Jupyter Notebooks. 
• Experience building customer solutions or open source projects using generative AI and/or multi-agent frameworks such as AutoGen, LangGraph, crewAI, or equivalent.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, ability to simplify and explain complex ideas.

Data Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $117,200 - $229,200 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 $153,600 - $250,200 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-pa

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until February 3, 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.

#MSFTSecurity LLMs Generative AI Agentic AI / Agentic Frameworks Knowledge graphs Security tradecraft  MSecADAPT