Principal Security Researcher - Red Team

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

13h

About The Position

Microsoft Security is hiring a Principal Security Researcher for an individual-contributor role on a new red team spanning agent security, offensive security, cloud identity, attack automation and adversarial AI. The role conducts hands-on red teaming of agentic systems and AI-enabled security products, designs realistic attack chains across models, tools, identities, permissions and isolation boundaries, and turns critical findings into durable improvements such as regression evaluations, automated attack suites, stronger controls and safer product designs.

The researcher will move between exploitation, systems analysis and AI-specific attack techniques. Success requires depth in offensive security or agent security, fluency across cloud and AI systems, and the judgment to produce reproducible evidence that engineering, product, security and independent review teams can act on. The preferred work location is Redmond, Washington; remote work within the United States may be considered for highly qualified candidates.

Requirements

• Doctorate in a relevant field and 3+ years of related research experience, or a master's degree in a relevant field and 4+ years of related research experience, or a bachelor's degree in a relevant field and 6+ years of related research experience, or equivalent experience.
• Must be able 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

• Hands-on expertise in offensive security, agent security, cloud or identity security, application security, exploitation or a closely related discipline.
• Experience designing security investigations that produce reproducible technical evidence and actionable remediation.
• Programming and engineering ability sufficient to build attack tooling, test harnesses, exploit prototypes and automated security tests.
• Experience testing large language models, agentic systems, tool use, plugins, connectors, multi-agent orchestration or AI-enabled security products.
• Experience with indirect prompt injection, cloud identity, authorization, sandboxing, container security, web or application exploitation, or offensive-security operations.
• Knowledge of secure agent architecture, least-privilege design, isolation boundaries, human-in-the-loop controls and high-fidelity security evaluation.
• Demonstrated ability to explain complex attack chains, severity and residual risk to engineers, product teams and senior decision-makers.
• Experience converting security findings into production mitigations, automated regression tests, architectural changes or durable security controls.

Responsibilities

• Design and execute end-to-end attacks against agentic systems, AI-enabled security products, orchestration frameworks, tools, plugins, connectors, identities, permissions and isolation boundaries.
• Investigate indirect prompt injection, unsafe tool use, scope violations, privilege escalation, confused-deputy behavior, secret exposure, sandbox escape, cross-agent manipulation and tampering with human oversight.
• Build realistic attack chains using attacker-controlled telemetry, alerts, code, web content and other inputs encountered by agents in production workflows.
• Develop automated attack suites and high-fidelity test environments that continuously exercise model behavior, harness logic, tools, identity and representative product telemetry together.
• Create rigorous threat models, attack hypotheses and reproducible evidence; assess exploitability, severity, and customer or governance impact.
• Partner with engineers, model researchers and product security teams to identify root causes and drive findings to verified remediation.
• Convert confirmed weaknesses into regression evaluations, adversarial scenarios, automated tests, stronger authorization boundaries and safer system designs.
• Communicate attack paths, findings and residual risk clearly to technical teams, leadership and independent reviewers.
• Track emerging agent attack techniques and real-world adversary behavior, then evolve MART methods, tooling and investments accordingly.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional benefits and pay information is available through the provided Microsoft careers link.

What This Job Offers

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