Member of Technical Staff (Senior AI Security Researcher)

Microsoft • ,

12d • $119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

The Member of Technical Staff (Senior AI Security Researcher) works within Microsoft Red Team’s Strategic AI organization, which conducts offensive AI security research and translates emerging risks into practical protection for Microsoft. The role focuses on post-training open-weight language models for cybersecurity tasks, including through recursive self-improvement. The researcher develops and curates training datasets, defines objectives, implements post-training methods, and runs reproducible experiments. They assess how training choices affect task performance, generalization, and security, and deliver trained model artifacts and reusable workflows for red-team partners.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field and 4+ years of related experience, or a master's degree in one of these fields and 3+ years of related experience, or a doctorate in one of these fields and 1+ year of related experience, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience training open-weight language models with distributed or multi-GPU infrastructure.
• Prior experience with preference optimization or reinforcement-learning-based post-training.
• Prior experience evaluating language models in adversarial or security-focused settings.
• Peer-reviewed publications or released research software in language-model training, post-training, or AI security.
• 2+ years of experience with Python and machine learning frameworks.
• Experience fine-tuning or post-training language models.
• Prior experience post-training language models for cybersecurity tasks or evaluating language models in adversarial or security-focused settings.
• Prior experience developing or applying recursive self-improvement methods for model training, or peer-reviewed publications or released research software in language-model training, post-training, or AI security.

Responsibilities

• Own hands-on post-training research projects for open-weight language models used for cybersecurity tasks.
• Develop and curate training data, objectives, and experimental controls; assess supervised, preference-based, and reinforcement-learning methods when relevant.
• Implement reproducible training pipelines and track datasets, configurations, checkpoints, and evaluation results.
• Develop and evaluate recursive self-improvement methods for training.
• Deliver trained model artifacts and reusable workflows that red-team partners can evaluate and apply.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior