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. Microsoft Defender group is building an industry leading security product that is deployed in tens of millions of devices: Windows, Windows Server, macOS and all common Linux enterprise distributions. The group puts an emphasis on top-notch engineering and quality to deliver innovative sensors and a highly stable platform and is looking for a stellar Security Researcher to contribute to our work. This position will be responsible for responding to customer escalations, performing False Positive and False Negative investigations, creating/tuning threat detection, and acting as a tier-2 escalation point for more junior researchers. _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._ **Responsibilities** **Conducting Research** + Uses research findings to develop guidance on security issues to inform improvements and resolution. Shares within team. Interacts with industry and research partners on ad hoc or as needed basis. + Prioritizes and validates technical indicators. Aggregates threat data into categories and themes that align to intelligence requirements or customer requests. Takes into consideration relative risk factors, history of published vulnerabilities and existing security knowledge into their analysis. Develops tools to assist in automating the analysis of a component or feature area. + Performs analysis using multiple data sources to generate insights. Considers common and potential threat scenarios and dependencies in analyses. Attends to and understands connections between identified issues and up- and-down stream processes. Helps to drive resolution to systemic security issues. Aids in the creation of new solutions to mitigate security issues. Makes tradeoffs to balance security and operational needs. + Identifies and conducts research into critical security areas, such as competitor products, current attacks, adversary tracking, and academic literature. Aids in the design of solutions to prevent attacks. Designs lead to engineering projects. Investigates the root cause, motivation, and impact of security issues. Incorporates feedback and results from research into future research. + Cleans, structures, and standardizes data and data sources. Supports data quality efforts to ensure timely and consistent access to data sources. Curates sources of data and partners to develop and sustain data access. Understands how to find new data sources. **Industry Leadership** + Demonstrates deep expertise in a defined set of security issues, tools, mitigations, and processes (e.g., architecture, failure modes, attack chain, threat modeling, vulnerabilities). + Provides guidance to others in areas of expertise. Maintains current knowledge by investing time and effort. Proactively seeks opportunities to learn. Demonstrates appropriate risk taking and ethical behavior. + Learns and understands the current state of the industry, including knowledge of tools, techniques, strategies, and processes that can be utilized to improve security. Maintains knowledge of current trends within the industry. **Orchestration** + Supports the management of incidents by applying technical knowledge to diagnose and triage issues with a commitment to maintaining the quality of products and services. Takes notes during incidents and participates in postmortem and root-cause analysis processes. + Protects tools, techniques, information, and results of security practices. Assesses efficacy of operational security (e.g., red-on-red pen testing). Begins to master techniques. + Identifies areas of dependency and overlap with other teams or team members. Provides constructive input so the work is integrated and timely. Communicates status with others to allow for timely resolution and coordination. Helps teams identify risks, dependencies and other blocking issues. Enables others to take action to resolve issues. + Creates analysis report. Follows up on the findings and recommendations, escalating blocking issues as needed. Identifies potential security vulnerabilities by reviewing documentation and specifications. Develops facts and libraries of guidance. **Solution Generation** + Drives end-to-end solution for technical implementation and automation related to specific kinds or classes of security issues (e.g., signature detection, malware, threat analysis, reverse engineering). Develops higher level awareness of other kinds of security issues outside areas of expertise. Works across disciplines to solve specific issues. Uses results from research and experimentation to guide architecture or product direction. + Identifies and responds to customer and partner security issues in a timely manner. Spots trends and potential security issues. Advocates for customers and partners. Provides assistance to customers and partners. Leverages partner and customer feedback to improve assistance. Escalates issues as needed. Develops guidance and education that result from resolution of security issues. + Identifies and addresses underlying causes of security shortcomings. Develops security guidance and models to address shortcomings and to build best practices. Suggests and drives appropriate guidance, models, response, and remediation for issues. **Other Responsbilities** + Investigate, analyze, and learn from security researchers, attackers, and real incidents to develop durable protection solution/strategies. + Identify and conduct research into critical security areas, such as current attacks, adversary tracking, and academic literature. Aid in the design of solutions to prevent attacks. + Work with other internal and external teams to forge new and improve existing partnerships that help mature the product. + Provide exemplary leadership in an exceptionally challenging and rewarding environment and influence the organization. + Collaborate with other researchers, coordinators, and developers to improve the protection capabilities of the products. **Qualifications** **Required/Minimum Qualifications:** + Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field OR 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection. **Other Requirements:** Security Clearance Requirements: Candidates must be able 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: + Candidates must have an **active** TS/SCI and be willing to upgrade to TS/SCI (with polygraph). This role will require candidates to maintain the TS/SCI (with polygraph) clearance. Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. Failure to maintain or obtain the appropriate clearance and/or customer screening requirements may result in employment action up to and including termination. + **Clearance Verification** : This position requires successful verification of the stated security clearance to meet federal government customer requirements. You will be asked to provide clearance verification information prior to an offer of employment. + **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 position requires verification of U.S. citizenship due to citizenship-based legal restrictions. Specifically, this position supports United States federal, state, and/or local United States government agency customer and is subject to certain citizenship-based restrictions where required or permitted by applicable law. To meet this legal requirement, citizenship will be verified via a valid passport, or other approved documents, or verified US government Clearance **Additional/Preferred Qualifications:** + Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field OR 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cyber-security, and/or anomaly detection. + Reverse Engineering skills: familiar with debuggers, disassemblers, network protocols, file formats, sandboxes, hardware/firmware internals, software communication mechanisms. + Excellent cross-group collaboration skills with the ability to articulate the business need for security or detection improvements. Security Research IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $100,600 - $199,000 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 $131,400 - $215,400 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 Microsoft will accept applications for the role until August 1st, 2026. \#MSFTSecurity #mtprjobs #mtprgovjobs #MSECAIR Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .