Senior Security Researcher

Microsoft

11h

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. The Identity Security Breach Response Squad (IDSEC BRS) is where engineers and security researchers come to work on the most challenging identity security problems at Microsoft. The team operates at the front lines of complex attacks, partnering closely with investigators and engineers to understand how real attacks unfold and to turn those insights into scalable detection, investigation, and response capabilities. BRS is deeply hands‑on: team members work directly with large‑scale identity telemetry, trace complex attack paths, and help shape the tools and systems that responders rely on during high‑impact security events. If you’re motivated by solving ambiguous problems, learning from real adversary behavior, and seeing your work directly improve how a global platform defends itself, this team offers the opportunity to make a tangible difference at cloud scale. 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

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 4+ 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.

Nice To Haves

Doctorate 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 Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 6+ 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 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
OR equivalent experience.
Experience in security research, threat analysis, incident response, or detection engineering.
Understanding of identity and access technologies, such as authentication and authorization protocols (OAuth, OIDC, SAML), tokens, certificates/PKI, and MFA.
Experience analyzing security telemetry at scale (for example, using Kusto, SQL, or similar analytics platforms).
Ability to translate complex technical findings into clear guidance for engineers and security stakeholders.
Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance; active clearance is a plus.

Responsibilities

Translate emerging security threats into clear, actionable engineering requirements, partnering with product and engineering teams to drive AI‑first solutions that close gaps quickly and scale protections across identity systems.
Investigate and analyze advanced identity based attacks, including token theft, certificate abuse, federation compromise, workload identity misuse, MFA bypass, and hybrid/cloud attack paths.
Perform deep security investigations using large scale telemetry across cloud identity systems, correlating signals to distinguish malicious activity from expected service behavior.
Design high fidelity detections based on adversary invariants and abuse patterns.
Partner with product and platform engineering teams to drive durable security improvements, including logging and telemetry enhancements, protocol hardening, policy changes, and safer default designs.
Contribute to incident response and post incident reviews, identifying root causes, systemic gaps, and long term mitigations that prevent recurrence.
Influence security strategy by identifying emerging threat classes, assessing residual risk, and advising engineering and security leadership.
Build or contribute to automation and tooling that accelerates investigation, detection, and remediation at cloud scale.
Collaborate across security, engineering, and research teams to improve Microsoft’s overall identity security posture.

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