Senior Security Researcher

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 Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) have unique optics into end-to-end attacks and how different stages manifest across our telemetry: we join the dots and show the art of the possible. The Threat Intelligence Research team research and develop new capability to detect attacks and threat actors through novel correlation and analysis ideas. We automate the generation of Threat Intelligence, and then achieve global impact by partnering across the company to connect it to customer-facing security solutions. We’re recruiting a Senior Security Researcher with deep expertise and a track record of successful security research delivery to tackle hard problems related to the discovery of threat actors targeting Microsoft and our customers. You’ll be working to analyze vast amounts of telemetry from different products then designing and prototyping protections for millions of customers. You will achieve this by working closely with the threat intelligence analyst community to build new insights and automate tracking of threat actors through your deep expertise in security product and platform internals. Security Research is a broad field, and we welcome interest from accomplished security researchers with a wide variety of prior expertise. Our primary focus is on threat intelligence-based detection through analysis of telemetry sent to the cloud or generated by internal cloud services – so a desire to work inside those systems at significant scale is essential.

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.

Responsibilities

• Harness your deep security research background and expertise to design and build new detection capabilities driven by threat intelligence and apply these to protect both Microsoft and customers.
• Discover new threat actor activity and build automations based on a deep understanding of product internals and telemetry.
• 5+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years experience working on and leading cutting-edge cyber security research projects.
• 3+ years experience building security capabilities and tooling in at least one programming language, such as Python, C#, C++.

Other Requirements:

• 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 Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field.
• Experience working with large datasets for the purpose of security research, using a query language such as SQL or KQL – and a passion for security data!
• Experience of Identity, Cloud Apps and Microsoft Cloud related security research, attacks, threat hunting and detection.
• Experience building threat detection logic for security products.
• Experience writing production-quality code and working on production systems, ideally in C# and running on Kubernetes.

Security Research IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across Canada is CAD $108,100 - CAD $199,700 per year.

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until November 19, 2024.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.