{"id":2795467,"url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-security-research-manager-2","title":"Principal Security Research Manager","company":{"id":18,"name":"Microsoft","domain":"microsoft.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/microsoft","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Eightfold","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":77,"open_postings":216,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.912,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":28,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Science & Research","role_family":"Science & Research","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Redmond, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":142800,"max":274800,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":274800},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-22T19:30:28Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-25","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T03:53:46Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":89,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":89},"description":"OverviewWe are building the evaluation backbone for safe, reliable, and efficient agentic engineering in Microsoft Security. This team will create systems that determine when an AI agent, model, prompt, tool, memory strategy, or orchestration pattern is ready to be used in production security and engineering workflows. The role is ideal for engineers who can operate end to end: understand the workflow, design the benchmark, build the harness, implement validators and graders, run experiments, analyze quality and cost tradeoffs, connect results to production feedback, and help teams make evidence-based release decisions.\nWhy this role matters: Microsoft Security is moving toward agentic engineering systems for security triage, remediation, repo readiness, and scan-to-verified-closure workflows. Evals are the trust system for that shift. They help decide whether autonomy can safely expand, whether a release should stop, and which configuration achieves the required quality, safety, reliability, latency, and cost bar with the lowest practical human-review burden.\nRole mission\nAs a Principal Security Research Manager on the AI Evaluation Systems team, you will build the common evaluation platform and methodology used by MSec agent programs. You will work across evaluation design, platform implementation, test infrastructure, telemetry, measurement, security workflow understanding, and production learning. Your work will make agentic systems measurable, reproducible, governable, and continuously improving.\nMicrosoft’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.\nResponsibilities\nDesign and build end-to-end evaluation harnesses for agentic security and engineering workflows, including triage, remediation, repo readiness, escalation, tool use, and scan-to-verified-closure paths.\n\nCreate representative benchmark suites and golden datasets that include normal, edge, adversarial, failure-recovery, regression, and production-derived cases.\n\nImplement deterministic validators, automated graders, trace analyzers, result stores, comparison views, and workflow adapters that make evaluations repeatable and actionable.\n\nMeasure task success, correctness, safety and policy compliance, failure recovery, latency, tool-call behavior, token usage, total cost per successful outcome, and human-review effort.\n\nCompare models, prompts, tools, memory strategies, policies, and orchestration patterns under consistent conditions and help teams understand quality-versus-efficiency tradeoffs.\n\nIntegrate evaluations into engineering workflows, CI/CD, release gates, and decision processes so material agent changes are supported by reproducible evidence before production rollout.\n\nConnect offline evaluation results with production feedback, including accepted and rejected outputs, human overrides, incidents, rollbacks, escaped defects, and customer or service-health signals.\n\nDetect regressions, benchmark drift, evaluator miscalibration, and cases where eval scores improve while real-world outcomes do not.\n\nPartner with agent builders, product teams, security engineers, data scientists, program managers, and leadership to turn evaluation results into release recommendations and autonomy-boundary decisions.\n\nConvert learnings into reusable paved paths: playbooks, templates, onboarding guides, dashboards, scorecards, and reference implementations that can scale across MSec.\n\nWhat you will build\nVersioned benchmark suites for security triage, remediation, repo readiness, tool use, escalation, and end-to-end agentic workflows.\n\nEvaluation runners and harnesses that can replay tasks, capture traces, evaluate outputs, and compare multiple agent configurations.\n\nDeterministic validation checks for code, policy, security, provenance, ownership, deployment constraints, and workflow-specific correctness.\n\nAutomated and human-in-the-loop grading pipelines with calibration, sampling, and confidence thresholds.\n\nPareto-style scorecards that show tradeoffs across quality, risk, latency, tokens, cost, and human-review burden.\n\nTelemetry and production feedback loops that continuously expand benchmark coverage and keep offline evaluation anchored to real-world outcomes.\n\nRelease-readiness gates and evidence packages that help leaders and product teams decide whether to scale, stop, or redesign an agent pattern.\n\nQualifications\nRequired Qualifications:\nDoctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detectionOR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection\nOR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection\nOR equivalent experience.\n\n1+ year(s) people management experience.\nPreferred Qualifications:\nDoctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 5+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection\nOR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection\nOR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 12+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection\nOR equivalent experience.\nProven software engineering experience building production systems, developer platforms, test infrastructure, automation frameworks, data pipelines, quality systems, or reliability tooling. \nAbility to design and implement evaluation systems end to end, including task definition, dataset creation, harness implementation, scoring, analysis, and operational integration. \nDemonstrated coding, debugging, system design, and operational excellence skills. \nExperience working with structured data, logs, traces, metrics, APIs, automation workflows, and engineering telemetry. \nExperience with LLMs, AI agents, model evaluation, prompt/tool orchestration, automated grading, evaluation harnesses, or benchmark design. \nExperience with experimentation, statistical confidence, evaluator calibration, regression analysis, human-review protocols, or quality measurement systems. \nExperience with security engineering, vulnerability management, SAST/SCA, SARIF, remediation workflows, secure development lifecycle, or compliance-sensitive systems. \nSecurity Research M5 - 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.\nCertain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:\nhttps://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay\nThis position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.\nMicrosoft 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8914,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Console Games","Gaming Consoles","Information Security","Developer Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-17T22:28:43Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":11,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.397,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":89,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":274800,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-security-research-manager-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-security-research-manager-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T06:37:10Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":7242,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":18},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=18"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-security-research-manager-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-security-research-manager-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-security-research-manager-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/microsoft-principal-security-research-manager-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-principal-security-research-manager-2"}]}