Member of Technical Staff – Senior AI Security Researcher

Overview

Security represents one of the most critical priorities for our customers amid rapidly evolving digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. The Cloud & AI organization accelerates Microsoft's mission to secure digital technology platforms, devices, clouds, and AI systems across customers' heterogeneous environments and Microsoft's own internal estate. Our culture centers on growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and helping teams and leaders bring their best every day. 

Microsoft Red Team (MRT) helps Microsoft anticipate emerging threats and strengthen the security of products, services, and AI systems. AI is increasingly important to that mission as capabilities and threat models evolve. Within MRT, the AI Red Team conducts forward-looking AI security research and translates emerging risks into practical protection for Microsoft. As a Member of Technical Staff, you will research adversarial AI-agent systems, with an emphasis on coordinated and swarm-like behavior. You will build instrumented environments to characterize campaigns, identify behavioral signatures, trace provenance, and evaluate methods for interrupting and containing coordinated offensive agent swarms. You will examine how coordination, adaptation, and evasion emerge across changing agent populations, tools, and operating conditions.

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

• Lead applied research on adversarial AI agents and coordinated multi-agent or swarm-like behavior.
• Characterize coordination patterns, behavioral signatures, provenance, and adaptation across agent populations.
• Build instrumented environments for observing and measuring agent coordination under controlled security scenarios.
• Develop and evaluate methods to detect, attribute, interrupt, and contain coordinated offensive agent swarms.
• Stress-test methods across changing models, tools, topologies, and operating conditions to identify evasion paths and failure modes.
• Produce reproducible evaluation assets and security guidance for red-team and defense partners.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience. 

• 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:

• Prior research or engineering experience in agentic AI security, including coordinated, multi-agent, or swarm-like behavior.
• Demonstrated record of independently leading complex research projects from problem formulation through reproducible results and partner adoption.
• Peer-reviewed publications, patents, or released research software in agentic AI security, adversarial machine learning, or threat detection.
• Prior experience designing instrumented security experiments or simulations for observing and evaluating coordinated agent behavior.
• Prior experience with behavioral analysis, provenance, detection, or attribution methods for AI systems or agents.
• Demonstrated research or engineering track record in AI security, adversarial machine learning, or cybersecurity.
• Demonstrated hands-on proficiency with Python and machine learning frameworks for research prototyping and experimentation.

Applied Sciences 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.