Senior Security Researcher - Security for AI

Senior Security Researcher - Security for AI Multiple Locations, United States Date posted Oct 10, 2025 Job number 1881804 Work site 3 days / week in-office Travel 0-25 % Role type Individual Contributor Profession Security Engineering Discipline Security Research Employment type Full-Time Overview 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 team builds and operates the large-scale AI training and adaptation engines that power Microsoft Security products, turning cutting-edge research into dependable, production-ready capabilities. As a Senior Security Researcher - Security for AI, you will lead end-to-end model development for security scenarios, including privacy-aware data curation, continual pretraining, task-focused fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and rigorous evaluation. You will deepen model reasoning and tool-use skills, and embed responsible AI and compliance into every stage of the workflow. The role is hands-on and impact-focused, partnering closely with engineering and product to translate innovations into shipped experiences, designing objective benchmarks and quality gates, and mentoring scientists and engineers to scale results across globally distributed teams. You will combine strong coding and experimentation with a systems mindset to accelerate iteration cycles, improve throughput and reliability, and help shape the next generation of secure, trustworthy AI for our customers. 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. Qualifications Required/minimum qualifications: • Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field • OR 5+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection. • Experience with privacy preserving ML including differential privacy concepts, privacy risk assessment, and utility measurement on privatized data. • Proven track record of building and training large language models or multimodal models for production scenarios, including continual pretraining and task specific adaptation. 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: • Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field OR 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection. 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 Microsoft will accept applications for the role until October 22, 2025. #MSFTSecurity #MSECAI #FoundationModels #ReinforcementLearning #DomainAdaptation #FineTuning #AgenticAI #ModelMerging #MSECAI #MSCareerEvents25 Responsibilities Responsibilities: • Identifies, prioritizes, and targets complex security issues that cause negative impact to customers. Creates and drives adoption of relevant mitigations. Suggests and drives appropriate guidance, models, response, and remediation for issues. Drives program and process of mitigation (e.g., automation). • Effectively manages multiple workstreams and resources during incidents, applies diagnostic expertise, provides guidance to other engineers working to mitigate and resolve issues, and maintains a commitment to the quality of products and services throughout the lifecycle. Ensures proper notes from incidents are documented and drives the execution of quality postmortem and root cause analysis processes across teams. Performs analysis of historical incident data to identify trends, patterns, and issues that should be addressed at high priority. • Uses business knowledge and technical expertise to assist with analyzing the work of the team to identify potential tools to assist future vulnerability analyses. Helps define deployment best practices and security configuration standards to ensure technologies are deployed in a secure fashion. Researches and maintains deep knowledge of industry trends, technologies, tools, securities, and advances. Uses subject matter expertise to identify potential security issues, tools, mitigations, and processes (e.g., architecture, failure modes, attack chain, threat modeling, vulnerabilities). Stays current in knowledge and expertise as security landscape evolves. Makes expertise available to others and drives change through sharing, coaching, conferences, and other means. Coaches and mentors others in area of expertise. Models appropriate risk taking and ethical behavior. Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.  Industry leading healthcare  Educational resources  Discounts on products and services  Savings and investments  Maternity and paternity leave  Generous time away  Giving programs  Opportunities to network and connect 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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.