Senior Applied Scientist - Security Research

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

21h

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. We are looking for a senior applied scientist to join and shape the research and product roadmap for the team in this space. We are looking to hire a Senior Applied Scientist - Security Research, you will have the opportunity to design and lead the implementation of advanced security solutions, leveraging cutting-edge machine learning and data-driven approaches to protect millions of users worldwide. You will collaborate with people at the forefront of their field from across the organization and see your ideas turn into reality with real-world impact at Microsoft scale. This is a hands-on role. 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.

Requirements

Bachelor'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 Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 1+ year(s) 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 Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

1+ years experience bringing new technology and approaches into production by applying long-term research efforts to solve immediate product needs.
4+ years applied ML/NLP experience delivering models and features to production at scale.
Languages and Technology - Python, R, C, SQL, Kusto / Azure Data Explorer, Power BI
Experimentation & evaluation: sound experimental design, metric design (quality, safety, latency, cost), and statistical analysis; experience running A/B tests.
Proven collaboration with partners and stakeholders to integrate ML into shipped product and to drive measurable business impact.
Experience with fraud/security a plus
Experience with developing Agentic AI (Artificial Intelligence) in a COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) efficient manner
Experience working across multiple product teams to deliver combined innovations and features and representing innovative work across the greater organization and/or the industry
Able to deliver impact through collaborative work across organizational boundaries and thrive in an agile environment balancing committed work with emerging innovative solutions
Model serving/inference (e.g., ONNX Runtime, vLLM, Triton, quantization, distillation, caching, dynamic batching, rate limiting).
Experimentation: A/B & interleavings, guardrail metrics (quality/safety/latency/cost), sequential testing, eval governance.

Responsibilities

Model development & optimization. Design, develop, fine‑tune, and evaluate models, summarization, and reasoning
Data & evaluation at scale. Build/extend data pipelines for curation/labeling/feature stores; author offline eval harnesses; run A/Bs; define guardrails and success metrics.
Production ML engineering. contribute to service code and configs; add monitoring, tracing, dashboards, and auto‑scaling; participate in on‑call and postmortems to improve live‑site reliability.
Collaboration & mentoring. Partner across PM/ENG/Research teams and beyond; identify AI technologies to create an adaptive and scalable solution to provide protection for our customers, share methods and code, review PRs, improve reproducibility and documentation; mentor junior scientists.
Prototype end to end solutions (working in partnership with other stakeholders) to quickly prove out emergent technologies.
Seek out experts across Microsoft and industry to learn about potential solutions and bring back the best and most relevant to solve our most critical problems.
Serves as a subject matter expert by owning models and participate in oncall
Let a deep empathy for customers guide you to improvements that make a tangible difference.

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