{"id":1831565,"url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-senior-security-research-engineer","title":"Senior Security Research Engineer","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":75,"open_postings":85,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Washington, United States","Reston, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":119800,"max":234700,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":234700},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Active Directory","optional":true},{"name":"Bicep","optional":true},{"name":"C#","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"CloudFormation","optional":true},{"name":"DNS","optional":true},{"name":"Go","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Linux","optional":true},{"name":"Microsoft Entra ID","optional":true},{"name":"Okta","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true},{"name":"Windows","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-29T18:03:07Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-10T21:35:42Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":11,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":11},"description":"OverviewSecurity 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.\nOur team develops realistic environments where security models and agents can learn through interaction and demonstrate their capabilities against verifiable outcomes. These environments support reinforcement learning for Microsoft's MAI models, evaluation of security perception agents, and evaluation of the software harnesses that provide agents with tools, context, and execution control. We are looking for a Senior Security Research Engineer to design and build enterprise environments spanning Azure, AWS, GCP, on-premises infrastructure, and third-party technologies. You will bring together working applications, identity systems, networks, operational activity, and security telemetry to reflect the conditions customers face. By making these environments reproducible and reliably resettable, you will enable repeated training and controlled comparisons that show whether changes to a model, agent, or harness improve security results. You will partner with security researchers and AI engineers to turn representative enterprise architectures into a reusable engineering platform. This role offers the opportunity to combine distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and security engineering with applied AI, while owning substantial capabilities from design through delivery and operation. Your work will help close the gap between performance on isolated tests and effectiveness in real customer environments.\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\nBuild realistic enterprises.\nConnect applications, networks, identities, and third-party services across Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-premises systems, including realistic user activity and security telemetry.\nMake environments repeatable.\nBuild reusable infrastructure, images, and self-service automation to provision, validate, reset, and retire complete environments.\nEnable AI training and evaluation.\nDeliver interfaces for agent actions, observations, and evidence collection so teams can reliably compare model, agent, and harness changes.\nEngineer for safe scale.\nSupport concurrent experiments with strong isolation, synthetic data, health checks, recovery, and cost controls.\nOwn capabilities end to end.\nPartner with security researchers and AI engineers to ship dependable systems, resolve cross-stack challenges, and mentor engineers.\nQualifications\nMinimum Qualifications:\nDoctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field OR Master's Degree 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 detection.\nOR Bachelor'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 equivalent experience.\nOther Requirements:\nAbility 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:\nMicrosoft Cloud Background Check:\nThis position will be required to pass the Microsoft background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.\nPreferred 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 detection.\nOR Master'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 Bachelor'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 equivalent experience.\n3+ years of experience developing software, infrastructure automation, or cloud platforms.\nExperience shipping and maintaining software or automation in Python, Go, C#, or TypeScript, using version control, automated tests, and code review. - Experience deploying applications and configuring networks, identities, and storage in at least one of Azure, AWS, or GCP.\nExperience connecting services across a second cloud or an on-premises environment. - Experience building infrastructure-as-code modules and CI/CD deployment pipelines using Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, or equivalent tools.\nExperience diagnosing Windows or Linux application failures involving DNS, routing, authentication, or service dependencies using logs, metrics, and system tools.\nExperience owning a platform capability from technical design through deployment and operational support, including documenting design decisions and resolving production failures.\nConfigured identity federation, certificate-based authentication, or workload identities using Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, or another enterprise identity provider.\nBuilt security labs or environment-as-a-service platforms with automated image creation, provisioning, baseline reset, and teardown.\nDeployed Kubernetes workloads with network policies, service identities, and centralized logging.\nAutomated synthetic user or administrator activity and collected identity, endpoint, or application telemetry for security testing.\nIntegrated versioned environments into RL training or agent-evaluation pipelines, including checks for configuration drift and state left over from previous runs.\nDesigned and built capture the flag challenges or competitions.\nSecurity Research 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.\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":8452,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"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":"2026-10-04T12:19:11Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":53,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.594,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":10,"expected_fill_days":22,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:mid","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":234700,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-senior-security-research-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-senior-security-research-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-11T00:34:57Z","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","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":511,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4489,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-12T00:00:00Z"}},"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-senior-security-research-engineer"},{"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-senior-security-research-engineer"},{"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-senior-security-research-engineer"},{"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-senior-security-research-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-senior-security-research-engineer"}]}