Senior Security Research Engineer

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 team develops realistic environments where security models and agents can learn through interaction and demonstrate their capabilities against verifiable outcomes. These environments support reinforcement learning for Microsoft's MAI models, evaluation of security perception agents, and evaluation of the software harnesses that provide agents with tools, context, and execution control. We are looking for a Senior Security Research Engineer to design and build enterprise environments spanning Azure, AWS, GCP, on-premises infrastructure, and third-party technologies. You will bring together working applications, identity systems, networks, operational activity, and security telemetry to reflect the conditions customers face. By making these environments reproducible and reliably resettable, you will enable repeated training and controlled comparisons that show whether changes to a model, agent, or harness improve security results. You will partner with security researchers and AI engineers to turn representative enterprise architectures into a reusable engineering platform. This role offers the opportunity to combine distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and security engineering with applied AI, while owning substantial capabilities from design through delivery and operation. Your work will help close the gap between performance on isolated tests and effectiveness in real customer environments.
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.

• Build realistic enterprises.
• Connect applications, networks, identities, and third-party services across Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-premises systems, including realistic user activity and security telemetry.
• Make environments repeatable.
• Build reusable infrastructure, images, and self-service automation to provision, validate, reset, and retire complete environments.
• Enable AI training and evaluation.
• Deliver interfaces for agent actions, observations, and evidence collection so teams can reliably compare model, agent, and harness changes.
• Engineer for safe scale.
• Support concurrent experiments with strong isolation, synthetic data, health checks, recovery, and cost controls.
• Own capabilities end to end.
• Partner with security researchers and AI engineers to ship dependable systems, resolve cross-stack challenges, and mentor engineers.

Security Research IC4 - 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

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. 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 with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.