Member of Technical Staff (Senior AI Security Researcher)

Microsoft • ,

12d • $119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

Microsoft Red Team (MRT) helps Microsoft anticipate emerging threats and strengthen the security of its products, services, and AI systems. Within MRT, the AI Red Team conducts forward-looking AI security research and translates emerging risks into practical protection. The Member of Technical Staff will research adversarial AI-agent systems, emphasizing coordinated and swarm-like behavior. The role involves building instrumented environments to characterize campaigns, identify behavioral signatures, trace provenance, and evaluate approaches for interrupting and containing coordinated offensive agent swarms. Research will examine how coordination, adaptation, and evasion emerge across changing agent populations, tools, and operating conditions.

The role is part of Microsoft's Cloud & AI organization, which works to secure digital technology platforms, devices, clouds, and AI systems across customers' heterogeneous environments and Microsoft's internal estate. Microsoft describes its culture as centered on growth mindset, excellence, collaboration, respect, integrity, accountability, and inclusion.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field and 4+ years of related experience, such as statistics, predictive analytics, or research; 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 research or engineering experience in agentic AI security, including coordinated, multi-agent, or swarm-like behavior.
• Demonstrated record of independently leading complex research projects from problem formulation through reproducible results and partner adoption.
• Peer-reviewed publications, patents, or released research software in agentic AI security, adversarial machine learning, or threat detection.
• Prior experience designing instrumented security experiments or simulations to observe and evaluate coordinated agent behavior.
• Prior experience with behavioral analysis, provenance, detection, or attribution methods for AI systems or agents.
• Demonstrated research or engineering track record in AI security, adversarial machine learning, or cybersecurity.
• Demonstrated hands-on proficiency with Python and machine learning frameworks for research prototyping and experimentation.

Responsibilities

• Lead applied research on adversarial AI agents and coordinated multi-agent or swarm-like behavior.
• Characterize coordination patterns, behavioral signatures, provenance, and adaptation across agent populations.
• Build instrumented environments for observing and measuring agent coordination under controlled security scenarios.
• Develop and evaluate methods to detect, attribute, interrupt, and contain coordinated offensive agent swarms.
• Stress-test methods across changing models, tools, topologies, and operating conditions to identify evasion paths and failure modes.
• Produce reproducible evaluation assets and security guidance for red-team and defense partners.

What This Job Offers

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