Principal Research Data and Service 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 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 Security AI Research team is responsible for defending Microsoft and our customers through applied AI innovation. 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.  Defending Microsoft’s complex environment provides a unique opportunity to build and evaluate autonomous defense and offense through emerging generative AI capabilities. Microsoft understands and learns from its own defensive and offensive expertise, including via teams like Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center and Microsoft’s Red Team, and has the opportunity to build a unique knowledge graph describing the relationship between risk, investigation, and response. This data, built over Microsoft’s complex digital estate, along with Microsoft AI forms the foundation for innovative solutions to defend Microsoft.

We are looking for a Principal Research Data and Service Engineer to join our applied science team to reshape how we defend Microsoft. You will establish and build processes and structures to empower research scenarios: from data engineering, construction of training data sets, creation of new telemetry sources, building of knowledge graphs, scalable infrastructure, and creation of agentic AI systems or new security-focused language models. You would be responsible for working together with applied scientists to develop systems to solve real-world scenarios and challenges. For those passionate about making a meaningful impact in the security industry, don’t miss this opportunity to join the team working on the latest AI technology and applicability. 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. 

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.

Required/Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field AND 4+ years technical experience in software engineering, network engineering, service engineering, or systems engineering
• OR equivalent experience.

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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Econometrics, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field
  • OR related field AND 12+ years technical experience in software engineering, statistics, predictive analytics, research
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of experience building, scaling and operating cloud services in Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• 4+ years of relevant industry experience driving cutting-edge research into real world impact.
• 4+ years or experience working with large-scale data processing tools

Service Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $137,600 - $267,000 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 $180,400 - $294,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until January 30, 2025. 

#MSFTSecurity LLMs Generative AI Agentic AI / Agentic Frameworks Knowledge graphs Security tradecraft  MSecADAPT

• You will respond to incidents and highly complex issues with major customers by identifying and troubleshooting the issue, deploying the appropriate fixes, and implementing automations to prevent recurring issues. You’ll also ensure adherence to and implementation of security, privacy, and compliance standards. 
• You will improve product development and operations across organizations by sharing and defining insights, best practices, and standards. You’ll do this by continually developing thought leadership, interacting with business leaders, and mentoring other engineers.
• Acts as enablers to research and applied scientists by creating infrastructure, services, and data pipelines using cloud technologies.
• Collaborate with researchers on the design, development, execution, and implementation of technology research projects that serve Microsoft Defenders. Facilitate the quality of prototypes through data visualization, monitoring, and alerting pipelines.
• Research and develop an understanding of tools, technologies, and methods being used in the community that can be utilized to improve product quality, performance, or efficiency.
• Incorporate state-of-the-art research or previously tested solutions occurring at Microsoft and academia and tune it to solve complex security challenges.