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Job Details
Posted date: Jun 24, 2025
There have been 22 jobs posted with the title of Senior Security Researcher all time at Microsoft.There have been 22 Senior Security Researcher jobs posted in the last month.
Category: Security Engineering
Location: Redmond, WA
Estimated salary: $188,900
Range: $119,800 - $258,000
Employment type: Full-Time
Travel amount: 25.0%
Work location type: Up to 100% work from home
Role: Individual Contributor
Description
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 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 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 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 can build a knowledgeable 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 Security Researcher to turn raw telemetry from our cloud and endpoint attack simulations into clear defensive insight. You’ll dive into identity, endpoint, and network logs, trace attacker behavior, extract repeatable patterns, and share findings that guide applied scientists, synthetic-data builders, and offensive researchers to the next blind spot. Alongside this analysis work, you’ll tune each lab tenant’s logging pipelines and security policies, studying how real-world configurations open attack paths and feeding those insights back into new simulations. Operating at the intersection of blue-team analysis, security-policy management, and data engineering, you’ll make sure our simulations produce trustworthy telemetry and that every team downstream can act on it.
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.
As a Senior Security Researcher, you will:
Sift through identity, network, and endpoint logs across Azure/AWS/GCP services—crafting queries, looking for patterns, and separating real attacker signal from background noise. Implement and tune the latest security controls across identity, endpoint, and cloud layers in every lab tenant, while configuring logging pipelines that capture end-to-end telemetry. Evaluate how identity, endpoint, and cloud policies interact, uncovering misconfigurations that open attack paths. Partner with applied scientists and red-team researchers to generate and analyze simulation logs, uncover blind spots, and distill insights that guide model tuning and future attack scenarios. Share defensive findings through briefs, training sessions, and tooling contributions, mentoring teammates and elevating detection and telemetry practices across the organization.
Qualifications
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. 5 + years in blue-team operations, threat hunting, or detection engineering, investigating incidents across hybrid environments (identity, endpoints, network, and at least one major cloud). Demonstrated expertise querying and labeling large security-log datasets—mapping events to frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK and separating attacker signal from benign noise. Hands-on experience configuring and validating cloud- and endpoint-level telemetry pipelines and security policies, ensuring comprehensive log coverage and a secure operational posture across environments.
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:
6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection. OR Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field. Proven record of shipping open-source security tooling or presenting original research at conferences such as Black Hat, DEFCON, or BSIDES. Experience designing or orchestrating realistic attack-and-defense simulations, translating security techniques into repeatable lab scenarios. Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and policy-as-code workflows (Terraform, Bicep, OPA, Azure Policy) for enforcing cloud logging and security baselines at scale.
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 June 29, 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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