Senior Security Operations Engineer

Microsoft • Washington, DC

7d

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 priority for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Defense Operations 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. Microsoft Defense Operations 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.
The Detection Engineering team in the CISO organization at Microsoft is seeking a motivated and self-driven security engineer to join a growing team of detection engineers, data scientists and automation engineers. We are looking for a Senior Security Operations Engineer to join our team!

The mission of the Detection Engineering (DE) team is to advance Microsoft's cyber defense capabilities through a strategic, proactive and holistic detection engineering approach. DE is committed to delivering effective and scalable detection solutions that enhance Microsoft's security posture and maintain a secure environment for Microsoft and our customers.
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

• 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 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 Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field 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.
• This position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions.

Nice To Haves

• Security Monitoring and Response: You have experience with MITRE or other attack frameworks and how to use it to identify and close gaps in detection capabilities.
• Security Architecture and Cloud Security expertise: 3+ years working in cyber security (Information Security, InfoSec, SecOps, Security Operations, SOC, CSOC, analyst, researcher, etc.) with experience in automation of analysis, response, or forensics.
• Previous experience in applying knowledge to uncover threats based on log data within Cloud Service Provider (CSP) environments (Azure AAD, Azure Resources, Event logs, Firewall, etc.) To build, analyze, and tune detections.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Cloud Security Technologies such as Azure Sentinel, Azure Defender, MDE, Application Governance , Defender for Cloud Apps, Azure Data Explorer and Azure Log Analytics or similar products like ArcSight, Splunk and Logstash; excellent understanding of prioritizing risk and threats.
• Automated Response and insights: Experience working with extremely large data sets to answer complex and ambiguous questions, using tools and languages like: SQL, KQL, Jupyter Notebook, Spark, R, U-SQL, Python, Splunk, and PowerBI and ability to automate repeatable security tasks through scripts or logic apps.
• Empathetic communication: You communicate nuanced ideas clearly, whether you're explaining technical decisions in writing or brainstorming in real time. In disagreements, you engage thoughtfully with other perspectives and compromise when needed.

Responsibilities

• Operate and maintain high availability detection pipelines and automation, ensuring reliable end to end signal flow.
• Author, onboard, and continuously enhance high fidelity detections including enrichments, filtering and correlation.
• Build and optimize automation that accelerates detection lifecycle, onboarding, tuning, and coverage expansion.
• Evaluate and tune detections proactively and reactively to reduce noise, improve SNR, and shorten investigation time.
• Develop and maintain detection rules, telemetry requirements, metrics, and dashboards, collaborating with product and service teams to improve alert fidelity, visibility, and platform health.

What This Job Offers

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