Senior Security Researcher and Principal Security Researcher (Multiple Positions)

• Design and build end-to-end evaluation harnesses for agentic security and engineering workflows, including triage, remediation, repo readiness, escalation, tool use, and scan-to-verified-closure paths. 
• Create representative benchmark suites and golden datasets that include normal, edge, adversarial, failure-recovery, regression, and production-derived cases. 
• Implement deterministic validators, automated graders, trace analyzers, result stores, comparison views, and workflow adapters that make evaluations repeatable and actionable.
• Measure task success, correctness, safety and policy compliance, failure recovery, latency, tool-call behavior, token usage, total cost per successful outcome, and human-review effort. 
• Compare models, prompts, tools, memory strategies, policies, and orchestration patterns under consistent conditions and help teams understand quality-versus-efficiency tradeoffs. 
• Integrate evaluations into engineering workflows, CI/CD, release gates, and decision processes so material agent changes are supported by reproducible evidence before production rollout. 
• Connect offline evaluation results with production feedback, including accepted and rejected outputs, human overrides, incidents, rollbacks, escaped defects, and customer or service-health signals. 
• Detect regressions, benchmark drift, evaluator miscalibration, and cases where eval scores improve while real-world outcomes do not. 
• Partner with agent builders, product teams, security engineers, data scientists, program managers, and leadership to turn evaluation results into release recommendations and autonomy-boundary decisions. 
• Convert learnings into reusable paved paths: playbooks, templates, onboarding guides, dashboards, scorecards, and reference implementations that can scale across MSec. 

What you will build 

• Versioned benchmark suites for security triage, remediation, repo readiness, tool use, escalation, and end-to-end agentic workflows. 
• Evaluation runners and harnesses that can replay tasks, capture traces, evaluate outputs, and compare multiple agent configurations. 
• Deterministic validation checks for code, policy, security, provenance, ownership, deployment constraints, and workflow-specific correctness. 
• Automated and human-in-the-loop grading pipelines with calibration, sampling, and confidence thresholds. 
• Pareto-style scorecards that show tradeoffs across quality, risk, latency, tokens, cost, and human-review burden. 
• Telemetry and production feedback loops that continuously expand benchmark coverage and keep offline evaluation anchored to real-world outcomes. 
• Release-readiness gates and evidence packages that help leaders and product teams decide whether to scale, stop, or redesign an agent pattern. 

Required Qualifications:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Proven software engineering experience building production systems, developer platforms, test infrastructure, automation frameworks, data pipelines, quality systems, or reliability tooling. 
• Ability to design and implement evaluation systems end to end, including task definition, dataset creation, harness implementation, scoring, analysis, and operational integration. 
• Demonstrated coding, debugging, system design, and operational excellence skills. 
• Experience working with structured data, logs, traces, metrics, APIs, automation workflows, and engineering telemetry. 
• Experience with LLMs, AI agents, model evaluation, prompt/tool orchestration, automated grading, evaluation harnesses, or benchmark design. 
• Experience with experimentation, statistical confidence, evaluator calibration, regression analysis, human-review protocols, or quality measurement systems. 
• Experience with security engineering, vulnerability management, SAST/SCA, SARIF, remediation workflows, secure development lifecycle, or compliance-sensitive systems.

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 $160,200 - $261,000 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

Security Research IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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 with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.