Principal  Applied Scientist - Social Engineering Threat Research

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

16h

About The Position

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.

We are looking for a Principal Applied Scientist to join our team. The Social Engineering Threat Research (SET‑R) team is part of Microsoft Security Research, focused on understanding and mitigating human‑targeted threats such as phishing, impersonation, scams, and other forms of social engineering that exploit trust, urgency, and manipulation. The team studies attacker behavior at scale, analyzes emerging threat patterns, and translates those insights into production‑grade protections across Microsoft Defender and related security platforms.
SET‑R brings together researchers, applied scientists, detection strategists, and customer‑intelligence specialists to bridge the gap between foundational research and real‑world impact. Our work spans threat discovery, data analysis, machine learning and AI‑driven modeling. This role in particular will focus heavely on grading and agentic workflows, effectiveness measurement and AI innovations focusing on enhanced customer experiences.
This role will be highly collaborative working accross multiple products and specialized sub-teams that cover the full lifecycle of social‑engineering defense, including large‑scale analytics, detection engineering, grading and AI agents, and customer‑facing intelligence. This role will enable SET‑R research teams to rapidly adapt to an evolving threat landscape while maintaining close alignment with engineering, product, and operations partners across Microsoft Security.
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.
In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).
• OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).
• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).
• OR equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical, or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).
• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical, or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).
• OR equivalent experience.
• 5+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team.
• 3+ years experience with processing large volumes of data in distributed environment (MapReduce, Spark, MPI, CUDA, etc)
• 1+ years experience with at least 1 statically typed object-oriented language (C, Java, C++, Fortran etc.)
• Familiarity with software development tools such as GIT, automated build systems, and project tracking systems.
• Proficiency in measuring the health and effectiveness of systems.
• Demonstrated ability and motivation to self-teach and navigate through ambiguity.
• Passion for cybersecurity is a plus, although previous experience or knowledge is not required.

Responsibilities

• Engage with stakeholders across our team and beyond to identify the most critical challenges worth solving
• Developing and supporting production AI models, heuristics, and production agentic workflows to detect social engineering attacks
• Technical leadership across emergent technologies
• Embody our culture and values

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees