Principal Security Researcher - Security for AI

Microsoft • Atlanta, GA

77d • $139,900 - $274,800

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. 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 team builds and operates the large-scale AI training and adaptation engines that power Microsoft Security products, turning cutting-edge research into dependable, production-ready capabilities. As a Principal Security Researcher - Security for AI, you will lead end-to-end model development for security scenarios, including privacy-aware data curation, continual pretraining, task-focused fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and rigorous evaluation. You will deepen model reasoning and tool-use skills, and embed responsible AI and compliance into every stage of the workflow. The role is hands-on and impact-focused, partnering closely with engineering and product to translate innovations into shipped experiences, designing objective benchmarks and quality gates, and mentoring scientists and engineers to scale results across globally distributed teams. You will combine strong coding and experimentation with a systems mindset to accelerate iteration cycles, improve throughput and reliability, and help shape the next generation of secure, trustworthy AI for our customers.

Requirements

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field OR 7+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection.
• Experience with privacy preserving ML including differential privacy concepts, privacy risk assessment, and utility measurement on privatized data.
• Proven track record of building and training large language models or multimodal models for production scenarios, including continual pretraining and task specific adaptation.

Nice To Haves

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field OR 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection.

Responsibilities

• Defines and collects the information that is needed and analyzes information to gain insight into and address complex security problems and threats.
• Works with others to incorporate findings into future designs and analyses (e.g. creates working groups).
• Sought by others for expertise. Demonstrates thought leadership.
• Influences direction and best practices across the organization. Leads, facilitates, and participates in industry and company-wide forums.
• Oversees creation and design of mitigations across multiple technologies and/or products.
• Drives product change to address systemic issues to mitigate and prevent recurrence. Anticipates previously unknown potential artifacts that could be present in data as indicators of attacker activity.
• Tracks advances within the industry, identifies relevant research, and adapts algorithms and/or techniques to develop new tools and automations.
• Leverages knowledge of work being done on team to propose future efforts.
• Proactively develops strategic responses to specific strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and/or trends.
• Serves as subject matter expert and role model for less experienced engineers.

Benefits

• The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Senior
• Industry: Publishing Industries
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees