Principal Security Researcher

Microsoft • De, DE

10h

About The Position

The Principal Security Researcher will lead the design, development, and evaluation of sophisticated, enterprise-scale environments used to train and evaluate AI security models and agents. The environments span Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, on-premises infrastructure, and third-party technologies, integrating applications, identity systems, networks, operational workflows, and security telemetry to reflect real-world enterprise security challenges.

The role focuses on making these environments reproducible, scalable, safely isolated, and reliably resettable for continuous training, consistent evaluation, and controlled testing. The researcher will help shape the technical direction of a reusable platform supporting security research and AI development, and will own complex initiatives from architecture and design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing operations. The role involves close collaboration with security researchers, AI engineers, and cross-functional engineering teams, and offers work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems.

For Microsoft Germany roles, Microsoft recommends spending at least two days per week in the office or at a customer site. The role requires passing Microsoft and Microsoft Cloud background checks upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Requirements

• Extensive experience developing software, infrastructure automation, or cloud platforms.
• Experience shipping and maintaining software or automation in Python, Go, C#, or TypeScript, using version control, automated tests, and code review.
• Experience deploying applications and configuring networks, identities, and storage in at least one of Azure, AWS, or GCP, plus experience connecting services across a second cloud or an on-premises environment.
• Experience building infrastructure-as-code modules and CI/CD deployment pipelines using Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, or equivalent tools.
• Experience diagnosing Windows or Linux application failures involving DNS, routing, authentication, or service dependencies using logs, metrics, and system tools.
• Experience owning a platform capability from technical design through deployment and operational support, including documenting design decisions and resolving production failures.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Configured identity federation, certificate-based authentication, or workload identities using Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, or another enterprise identity provider.
• Built security labs or environment-as-a-service platforms with automated image creation, provisioning, baseline reset, and teardown.
• Deployed Kubernetes workloads with network policies, service identities, and centralized logging.
• Automated synthetic user or administrator activity and collected identity, endpoint, or application telemetry for security testing.
• Integrated versioned environments into reinforcement learning training or agent-evaluation pipelines, including checks for configuration drift and state left over from previous runs.
• Designed and built capture-the-flag challenges or competitions.

Responsibilities

• Build realistic enterprise environments connecting applications, networks, identities, and third-party services across Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-premises systems, including realistic user activity and security telemetry.
• Build reusable infrastructure, images, and self-service automation to provision, validate, reset, and retire complete environments.
• Deliver interfaces for agent actions, observations, and evidence collection so teams can reliably compare model, agent, and harness changes.
• Support concurrent experiments with isolation, synthetic data, health checks, recovery, and cost controls.
• Partner with security researchers and AI engineers to deliver dependable systems and resolve cross-stack challenges.
• Own platform capabilities from technical design through deployment and operational support.
• Mentor engineers.
• Document design decisions and resolve production failures.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed