AI Security Researcher Expert

Join the elite Microsoft Defender Research team, where we turn deep security research into autonomous protection that detects, investigates, and disrupts sophisticated attacks in near real-time across endpoints, identities, cloud applications, and cloud infrastructure. Leveraging Microsoft’s global reach and one of the world’s largest security telemetry sets, you will have a direct, tangible impact on protecting organizations and the global economy. This is an opportunity for researchers who are passionate about transforming security operations and shaping how defenders investigate and stop attacks at scale. 

We are looking for a Principal Security Researcher to lead research for key agents within Project Perception, part of Microsoft’s broader agentic security evolution. You will lead research for this area end to end, from framing high-impact investigation problems and bringing domain expertise into agents design and evaluation, to partnering with data science, engineering, product, and other teams to move these capabilities into production and customer-facing experiences. 

Our team values diversity and strives to hire individuals with varied experiences and perspectives. We understand that no candidate possesses every desired skill and experience, but together, we form a strong, effective team.

• Lead security research for agents within Project Perception, from defining high-impact problems and research methodology through agent design, rigorous evaluation, production readiness, and customer-facing experiences.
• Set the research strategy and align partner teams across the organization. Translate research priorities into clear requirements and experiments, use evidence to influence roadmap decisions, and communicate strategy, findings, and recommendations to senior stakeholders.
• Drive research outcomes into production and customer-facing experiences. Partner with engineering, data science, and product teams to define success criteria, validate quality and safety, establish production readiness, measure customer impact, and iterate based on real-world performance.
• Analyze large-scale data and conduct investigations to improve the quality and effectiveness of Project Perception agents, building on and contributing to Microsoft Defender’s protection knowledge layer.
• Apply and champion AI in security research, using current models, agentic architectures, coding agents, and tooling to accelerate triage, investigation, and detection and increase researcher productivity. Validate AI outputs and develop reusable workflows.
• Mentor and grow researchers, elevating the team’s technical bar.