Senior Detection Portfolio Engineer

Microsoft • ,

4d • $119,800 - $261,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Cyber Defense Operations Detection Engineering owns the end-to-end detection system that turns adversary activity into reliable, high-signal cases for investigation at incident speed. This role sits at the center of that system. You will own a detection portfolio: a named set of threat actors, techniques, and partner platforms for which you are singularly accountable for what we detect, what we stop detecting, and whether we can defend that answer to leadership, auditors, and incident reviewers. This is a hands-on portfolio role, not a program management role. This role is built for someone who has worked cases. You should have sat in a SOC seat, chased real adversary activity through telemetry, and felt the cost of a noisy detection on the receiving end. You will author and optimize detections yourself, working directly with our investigation and hunt partners to convert engagement findings into production detection logic. But the majority of your leverage comes from the decisions you make about the portfolio rather than the detections you write personally: what gets built, who builds it, what gets onboarded, and what gets turned off.

Requirements

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection, Security Operations Center (SOC) detection, threat analytics, security incident and event management (SIEM), information technology (IT), or operations incident response OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection, Security Operations Center (SOC) detection, threat analytics, security incident and event management (SIEM), information technology (IT), or operations incident response OR equivalent experience.
• Candidates must be able 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.
• Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This role will require access to information that is controlled for export under export control regulations, potentially under the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations or Export Administration Regulations, the EU Dual Use Regulation, and/or other export control regulations. As a condition of employment, the successful candidate will be required to provide either proof of their country of citizenship or proof of their U.S. permanent residency or other protected status (e.g., under 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3)) for assessment of eligibility to access the export controlled information. To meet this legal requirement, and as a condition of employment, the successful candidate’s citizenship will be verified with a valid passport. Lawful permanent residents, refugees, and asylees may verify status using other documents, where applicable.
• Citizenship & Citizenship Verification: This position requires verification of citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local government agency customers and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, and as a condition of employment, the successful candidate’s citizenship will be verified with a valid passport.

Nice To Haves

• 3+ years in a security operations role — SOC analyst (Tier 1/2/3), threat hunter, or incident investigator — with direct responsibility for triaging, investigating, and closing real adversary activity.
• Demonstrated ability to author production detection logic independently, start to finish, and to optimize existing detections for signal quality and query performance.
• Excellent Kusto (KQL) proficiency, including performance tuning against large data lakes.
• Working fluency in threat actor tradecraft and MITRE ATT&CK, sufficient to engage, without support, with threat intelligence and hunt teams about technique-to-actor mapping, detection intent, and detection syntax.
• Experience making and defending offboarding or deprecation decisions on security controls, including the ability to say no to a partner team and make it stick.
• Comfort with detection quality concepts: signal-to-noise ratio, precision, recall, gating criteria, and true-positive validation.
• Comfort building and using automation and AI-assisted tooling (Python, notebooks, LLM-based workflows) to scale analysis and detection work, and related tools (Jupyter, Synapse).
• Ability to operate with autonomy influence others without authority structure unstructured problems provide clarity where ambiguity exists.

Responsibilities

• Own an assigned threat actor and partner portfolio end-to-end, including onboarding, offboarding, and tuning decisions, each with explicit written rationale.
• Partner directly with investigation and hunt leads to translate investigation, hunt, and incident findings into detection ideas, and author high-fidelity detections against those ideas using Kusto and our detection platform.
• Gate and approve detections and detection ideas and detection submissions from partner teams against our priorities and charter; return ideas that fail gating with clear, actionable rationale and resubmission guidance.
• Review detections authored by others, including partner-team submissions, for intent fidelity, query performance, and production reliability.
• Hold the portfolio to an investigator case budget.
• Make explicit coverage-versus-noise tradeoffs and drive volume down without surrendering coverage on the behaviors that matter.
• Select, engineer, tune, and leverage AI-assisted and automation frameworks for all aspects of the detection lifecycle: tuning, gating, triage, and investigation.
• Serve as the primary interface to partner detection teams and to our investigations partners, routing authoring work to the right owner and enforcing the engagement contract.
• Participate in the detection workstream on-call rotation and lead the detection workstream during incidents: establish whether a detection fired and why, decide whether we author, decide whether we can leverage an existing detection, and drive that work at incident speed.
• Maintain an evidence-backed view of detection coverage for your portfolio and produce leadership-ready updates on a regular operating rhythm.

Benefits

• The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 per year.
• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
• Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree