Principal AI Model Security Researcher

Microsoft Security is seeking a Principal AI Model Security Researcher to join a new red team spanning adversarial machine learning, model integrity, offensive security, automation and privacy. You will conduct hands-on red teaming of advanced AI models and the training and evaluation systems around them; design attacks that expose exploitable model behavior; and turn critical findings into durable improvements such as regression evaluations, adversarial environments, stronger controls and safety training data.

These are roles for researchers who can move between scientific investigation and operational security work. Success requires depth in adversarial machine learning or offensive security, fluency across the broader AI system, and the judgment to produce reproducible evidence that research, engineering, product and independent review teams can act on.

Work Location: Redmond, WA (preferred). Remote work within the United States will be considered for highly qualified candidates.

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

• Design and execute white-box attacks against advanced AI models, checkpoints, post-training systems, reward functions, data pipelines and evaluation environments.
• Investigate adversarial behavior including jailbreaks, harmful permissiveness, reward hacking, deceptive behavior, capability elicitation, privacy leakage, data poisoning and model supply-chain compromise.
• Build high-fidelity experiments and automated attack suites that reproduce realistic threats and run continuously against new checkpoints and system configurations.
• Develop rigorous threat models, attack hypotheses and reproducible evidence; assess severity, exploitability and customer or governance impact.
• Partner with model scientists, engineers and product security teams to identify root causes and drive findings to verified remediation.
• Convert confirmed weaknesses into regression evaluations, adversarial training or RL environments, safety training data and stronger technical controls.
• Communicate findings and residual risk clearly to technical teams, leadership and independent reviewers.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Doctorate in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience
  • OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 4+ years related research experience
    • OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 6+ years related research experience
      • OR equivalent experience.

Other 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:

• 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:

• Hands-on expertise in adversarial machine learning, AI security, model evaluation, privacy attacks, offensive security or a closely related discipline.
• Experience designing experiments or security investigations that produce reproducible technical evidence and actionable remediation.
• Programming and research-prototyping ability sufficient to build attack tooling, evaluation harnesses and automated tests.
• Experience testing large language models, post-training or reinforcement-learning systems, agentic systems or AI-enabled security products.
• Knowledge of reward modeling, interpretability, capability elicitation, data extraction, poisoning, privacy or model supply-chain security.
• Experience with cyber exploitation, cloud or identity security, sandboxing, secure evaluation environments or offensive-security operations.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex attack paths, severity and residual risk to researchers, engineers and senior decision-makers.
• Experience converting research findings into production evaluations, mitigations, training interventions or security controls.

Research Sciences IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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.