Job description

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 hundreds 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 Senior 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 • Identifies, conducts, and supports others in conducting research into critical security areas, such as competitor products, current attacks, adversary tracking, and academic literature. Partners cross-functionally (e.g., across disciplines, teams, or security versus non-security) to design solutions to prevent attacks. Designs lead to engineering projects. Investigates business critical security issues (e.g., root cause, motivation, and impact). Advocates priorities. Elevates findings appropriately to address and mitigate issues. Solicits feedback and evaluates results to incorporate into future research. Demonstrates judgment in identifying projects and priorities (e.g., what to test and pursue). Understands interplay across Microsoft technologies and how they give rise to attacker opportunities. • Works with others to synthesize research findings into recommendations for mitigation of security issues. Shares across teams. Drives change within team based on research findings. Contributes to professional community through publications. • Analyzes complex issues using multiple data sources to develop insights and identify security problems and threats. Creates new solutions to mitigate security issues. Makes tradeoffs to balance security and operational needs. Identifies and recommends process improvements and adopts best practices. Leverages the work of others to improve existing processes. Helps to drive resolution to systemic security issues through cross-team collaboration. Anticipates previously unknown potential artifacts that could be present in data as indicators of attacker activity. Drives cross-team collaboration. May contribute to professional community through conference and forum presentations. • Recommends prioritization and validation methods for technical indicators. Synthesizes threat data to generate trends, patterns and insights that align to intelligence requirements or customer requests. Reviews findings and identifies nuanced variants. Develops tools to automate analyses. • Leads efforts to clean, structure, and standardize data and data sources. Leads data quality efforts to ensure timely and consistent access to data sources. Curates sources of data and partners to develop and sustain data access across teams. Incorporates new data sources consistent with corporate data privacy standard. • Takes product schedules, dependencies and risk assessments into consideration in performing security design and analysis. Creates a schedule for analysis of large feature areas that accounts for dependencies and meets milestones. Creates schedule for a security analysis that involves several stakeholders and that optimizes their time and effort. Conducts Security Research of Microsoft and competitor products. Researches, analyzes, and summarizes security threats and shares with security assurance and security tooling teams as enhancements to security compliance program. • Identifies, prioritizes, and targets complex security issues that cause negative impact to customers. Creates and drives adoption of relevant mitigations. Suggests and drives appropriate guidance, models, response, and remediation for issues. Drives program and process of mitigation (e.g., automation). Solution Generation • Identifies, prioritizes, and targets complex security issues that cause negative impact to customers. Creates and drives adoption of relevant mitigations. Suggests and drives appropriate guidance, models, response, and remediation for issues. Drives program and process of mitigation (e.g., automation). • Solves classes of issues systematically and with transparency to customers in technical implementation and automation of solutions related to specific kinds of security issues (e.g., signature detection, malware, threat analysis, reverse engineering). Begins to develop substantial skills in other kinds of security issues outside areas of expertise. Works across disciplines to build improvements in solutions and methods. Uses results from research and experimentation to drive architecture or product direction for Microsoft. • Engages with customers and partners to improve security issues. Analyzes security issues or patterns. Advocates for customers and partners. Develops feedback channels and translates feedback into better security practices. Escalates issues as needed. Fosters adoption of security features (e.g., multi-factor authentication [MFA]). Develops and provides guidance and education that result from resolution of security issues. Orchestration • Helps to make connections and assist in developing agreements between groups to clarify priorities and identify dependencies. Provides coordination across groups. Articulates key security issues to teams and to upper management. Autonomously drives coordination and collaboration across teams. Participates in internal or external collaboration in representing Microsoft's interests. • Protects tools, techniques, information, and results of security practices. Assesses efficacy of operational security (e.g., red-on-red pen testing). Develops new techniques to evaluate operational security. Teaches others to master techniques. • Effectively manages multiple workstreams and resources during incidents, applies diagnostic expertise, provides guidance to other engineers working to mitigate and resolve issues, and maintains a commitment to the quality of products and services throughout the lifecycle. Ensures proper notes from incidents are documented and drives the execution of quality postmortem and root cause analysis processes across teams. Performs analysis of historical incident data to identify trends, patterns, and issues that should be addressed at high priority. • Leads large-scale security reviews. Leads work on architectural and design security reviews for feature areas. Where appropriate, ensures best practices for security architecture, design and development are in place. Measures return on investment (ROI). Determines value of investment. Measures customer satisfaction. Evaluates security risks and their impact to the affected services and works with Dev. Ops leads, engineering leads and researchers to mitigate risks. Monitors and responds to security events, potential vulnerabilities, exposures, and policy compliance issues. Industry Leadership • Uses subject matter expertise to identify potential security issues, tools, mitigations, and processes (e.g., architecture, failure modes, attack chain, threat modeling, vulnerabilities). Stays current in knowledge and expertise as security landscape evolves. Makes expertise available to others and drives change through sharing, coaching, conferences, and other means. Coaches and mentors others in area of expertise. Models appropriate risk taking and ethical behavior. • Uses business knowledge and technical expertise to assist with analyzing the work of the team to identify potential tools to assist future vulnerability analyses. Helps define deployment best practices and security configuration standards to ensure technologies are deployed in a secure fashion. Researches and maintains deep knowledge of industry trends, technologies, tools, securities, and advances. Additional Responsibilities • Investigate, analyze, and learn from security researchers, attackers, and real incidents to develop durable protection solution/strategies across the kill-chain or product/OS enhancements • 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, and • Collaborate with other researchers, coordinators, and developers to improve the protection capabilities of the products. Other • Embody our culture and values Qualifications Required/Minimum Qualifications: • 5+ years experience in cybersecurity, threat detection, threat hunting, incident response, and/or anomaly detection • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field. 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 • 6+ years experience in cybersecurity, threat detection, threat hunting, incident response, and/or anomaly detection • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field • 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 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 $158,400 - $258,000 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 Microsoft will accept applications for the role until June 11, 2025 #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.

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