Senior Security Researcher - CTJ - TS/SCI

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

3d•$119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

Microsoft Defender is building an industry-leading security product deployed across hundreds of millions of devices, including Windows, Windows Server, macOS, and common Linux enterprise distributions. The Security Researcher will help deliver innovative sensors and a stable platform by responding to customer escalations, investigating false positives and false negatives, creating and tuning threat detections, and serving as a tier-2 escalation point. The role involves deep endpoint threat research and end-to-end ownership of detection work, from threat analysis through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and tuning. The researcher will analyze telemetry, malware, threat intelligence, customer incidents, and hunting data to identify attack patterns and protection gaps. The role also uses AI and agentic workflows to automate research and detection processes, and drives cross-team work when protection improvements span research, telemetry, engineering, or product teams.

Requirements

Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or a related field; or a master's degree in one of these fields and 3+ years of relevant experience; or a bachelor's degree in one of these fields and 4+ years of relevant experience; or equivalent experience.
Relevant experience may include software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
Must have an active TS/SCI clearance and be willing and eligible to upgrade to TS/SCI with polygraph; must maintain the required clearance.
Must meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including clearance verification and the Microsoft Cloud background check.
Must provide verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions.

Nice To Haves

Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or a related field and 3+ years of relevant experience.
Master's degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or a related field and 6+ years of relevant experience.
Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or a related field and 8+ years of relevant experience.
Equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Conduct deep endpoint threat research, including malware reverse engineering, attacker techniques, exploitation, defense evasion, persistence, and emerging threats.
Investigate false positives, false negatives, missed detections, and customer escalations, and use findings to improve Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) protection quality.
Analyze MDE telemetry, malware samples, threat intelligence, customer incidents, and hunting data to identify new attack patterns and protection gaps.
Own detection work end to end, from threat hypothesis and technical analysis through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and tuning.
Use AI and agentic workflows to automate investigation, enrichment, malware analysis, detection development, testing, and validation while retaining researcher judgment for final decisions.
Drive cross-team work when resolving a protection gap requires changes across research, telemetry, engineering, or product boundaries.