Security Researcher

Microsoft

2d

About The Position

The Cloud & AI 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. Microsoft is one of the largest enterprise service companies in the world.
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.
- Do you have a passion for helping Microsoft’s clients defend themselves against targeted exploitation?
- Are you interested in being intimately involved in the latest, cutting-edge developments in the security industry and having a direct impact on the security of all Microsoft customers?
- Do you want to be on the front lines of helping our customers go toe-to-toe against advanced adversaries?
- Are you interested in a fast-paced job full of new opportunities?

If so, you may be a fit for a Security Researcher role for the Global Hunting, Oversight, and Strategic Triage (GHOST) team!
We are looking for a Security Researcher with engineering experience and analytical background to join our team. The role combines development of tools, engineering scalable systems, and using those systems to assist with investigations. By applying engineering skills as an active member on investigations, you will incubate investigation best practices from experiments to scalable solutions that can be applied to proprietary solutions, Microsoft tooling and products. Researchers will support a global team to identify and catalog new attacker TTPs, victims, to protect worldwide enterprise customers and empower customers to protect themselves via constantly improving Microsoft products.
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

• Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 1+ year(s) experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 2+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
• OR equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:
• 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.
• This position requires verification of U.S citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customers and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport.

Nice To Haves

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 5+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
• OR equivalent experience.
• Proven knowledge of security fundamentals across Microsoft platforms (Client, Server, Cloud).
• Familiarity and understanding of SQL or Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries (or experience with large database/SIEM query languages such as Splunk/Humio/Kibana, etc.)
• Familiarity and understanding of Jupyter Notebooks, or building equivalent threat hunting automations with scripting languages.
• Experience with sophisticated threat actor evidence including familiarity with typical Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), Indicators of Activity (IOAs) and Tools, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs).
• Microsoft Azure platform knowledge and experience.
• Familiar with various forensic log artifacts.
• Familiarity with Microsoft security products stack.
• Familiar with Windows, Linux, and/or macOS forensic analysis.
• Technical/Investigation/Cybersecurity/Digital Forensics/DFIR certifications (e.g. CISSP, CSSLP, SANS GIAC, Azure etc.)
• Professional experience with coding in at least one language: C#, Golang, or Python.

Responsibilities

• Identifying potential threats, allowing for proactive defense before an actual incident.
• Building proof-of-concept, prototype, and production-ready threat hunting tools, automations, and new capabilities.
• Driving product and tooling improvements by conveying learnings from threat hunting and incident response at scale to engineering partner teams
• Monitor, maintain, and iterate on proprietary solutions that enable our team to threat hunt.
• Implement security controls of relevant mitigations to defend against current and future threat landscape.
• Contribute across teams in producing extensible, testable, and maintainable code.

What This Job Offers

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