ZipRecruiter

Log In

1

Microsoft Security Researcher Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Microsoft

Security Researcher

Redmond, WA · On-site

$102K - $202K/yr

Join Microsoft's AI Red Team where you'll emulate work alongside security experts to test for security and safety failures. We are looking for a Security Researcher with demonstrated cybersecurity ...

Microsoft

Principal Security Researcher

Redmond, WA · On-site

We are seeking a Principal Security Researcher to build and improve the AI-powered, agentic system ... Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Microsoft

Security Researcher II

Redmond, WA · On-site

Microsoft is one of the largest enterprise service companies in the world. Do you have a passion ... We are looking for an experienced Security Researcher II with a Digital Forensics and Incident ...

Microsoft

Software Engineer II

Redmond, WA · On-site

... security researchers If so, you'll love our collaborative, agile, and fun group with a startup mindset. We are part of the Defender Experts product unit (part of Microsoft's Security division). Our ...

Microsoft

Senior Software Engineer

Redmond, WA · On-site

$137K - $180K/yr

Partner closely with Product Management, Security Research, and Data Science teams to deliver high-impact solutions. * Embody Microsoft's culture and values. Qualifications Required Qualifications:

CrowdStrike

Sr. Security Researcher (Remote).

CrowdStrike Intelligence is seeking a motivated security researcher with excellent technical skills ... Solid understanding of at least two operating system platforms, including Microsoft Windows.

next page

Showing results 1-20

All JobsMicrosoft Security Researcher Jobs

Microsoft Security Researcher information

See salary details

$47

$51

$54

How much do microsoft security researcher jobs pay per hour?

As of Sep 9, 2026, the average hourly pay for microsoft security researcher in the United States is $51.44, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $49.76 and $53.12 per hour, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a Microsoft Security Researcher?

A Microsoft Security Researcher is a professional who investigates security threats, vulnerabilities, and cyberattacks related to Microsoft products and services. Their responsibilities include analyzing software for security flaws, developing patches or mitigations, and collaborating with other teams to improve overall security. They may also engage in threat intelligence, penetration testing, and reporting newly discovered vulnerabilities to relevant teams. Their work is crucial in protecting both Microsoft’s infrastructure and its customers from evolving cyber threats.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a Microsoft Security Researcher?

To thrive as a Microsoft Security Researcher, you need deep expertise in cybersecurity principles, vulnerability assessment, and threat intelligence, often supported by a degree in computer science or related field. Familiarity with security tools such as reverse engineering frameworks, malware analysis platforms, and certifications like CISSP or CEH is highly valuable. Analytical thinking, attention to detail, and strong communication skills help distinguish outstanding professionals in this role. These competencies are essential for identifying threats, developing robust defenses, and effectively sharing findings to protect Microsoft products and users.

What types of projects and teams do Microsoft Security Researchers typically collaborate with?

Microsoft Security Researchers frequently work in cross-functional teams that include software engineers, threat analysts, and product managers. They often collaborate on projects such as vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and security feature development for Microsoft products and services. This collaborative environment means researchers regularly share findings, contribute to threat intelligence, and assist in incident response efforts. The structure encourages knowledge sharing and offers opportunities to work on diverse, high-impact security challenges across multiple products.

What are popular job titles related to Microsoft Security Researcher jobs?

For Microsoft Security Researcher jobs, the most frequently searched job titles are:

Infographic showing various Microsoft Security Researcher job openings in the United States as of September 2026, with employment types broken down into 85% Full Time, 13% Part Time, and 2% Contract. Highlights an 90% Physical, 2% Hybrid, and 8% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $107,000 per year, or $51.4 per hour.

Senior Security Researcher and Principal Security Researcher (Multiple Positions)

Redmond, WA • On-site

Microsoft
Computer and Computer Peripheral Equipment and Software Wholesalers • 10K+ employees
Learn more about Microsoftexternal

Full-time

Re-posted 13 days ago

Microsoft rating

8.6

Company rating: 8.6 out of 10

Based on 134 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

70th of 247 rated software companies

Job description

Overview
We 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.
Why 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.
Role mission
As a Senior Security Researcher and Principal Security Researcher 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.
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
  • Design 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.
  • Create representative benchmark suites and golden datasets that include normal, edge, adversarial, failure-recovery, regression, and production-derived cases.
  • Implement deterministic validators, automated graders, trace analyzers, result stores, comparison views, and workflow adapters that make evaluations repeatable and actionable.
  • Measure task success, correctness, safety and policy compliance, failure recovery, latency, tool-call behavior, token usage, total cost per successful outcome, and human-review effort.
  • Compare models, prompts, tools, memory strategies, policies, and orchestration patterns under consistent conditions and help teams understand quality-versus-efficiency tradeoffs.
  • Integrate evaluations into engineering workflows, CI/CD, release gates, and decision processes so material agent changes are supported by reproducible evidence before production rollout.
  • Connect offline evaluation results with production feedback, including accepted and rejected outputs, human overrides, incidents, rollbacks, escaped defects, and customer or service-health signals.
  • Detect regressions, benchmark drift, evaluator miscalibration, and cases where eval scores improve while real-world outcomes do not.
  • Partner with agent builders, product teams, security engineers, data scientists, program managers, and leadership to turn evaluation results into release recommendations and autonomy-boundary decisions.
  • Convert learnings into reusable paved paths: playbooks, templates, onboarding guides, dashboards, scorecards, and reference implementations that can scale across MSec.

What you will build
  • Versioned benchmark suites for security triage, remediation, repo readiness, tool use, escalation, and end-to-end agentic workflows.
  • Evaluation runners and harnesses that can replay tasks, capture traces, evaluate outputs, and compare multiple agent configurations.
  • Deterministic validation checks for code, policy, security, provenance, ownership, deployment constraints, and workflow-specific correctness.
  • Automated and human-in-the-loop grading pipelines with calibration, sampling, and confidence thresholds.
  • Pareto-style scorecards that show tradeoffs across quality, risk, latency, tokens, cost, and human-review burden.
  • Telemetry and production feedback loops that continuously expand benchmark coverage and keep offline evaluation anchored to real-world outcomes.
  • Release-readiness gates and evidence packages that help leaders and product teams decide whether to scale, stop, or redesign an agent pattern.

Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
  • Doctorate 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
    • OR 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
    • OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:
  • Doctorate 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
    • OR 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
    • OR 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
    • OR equivalent experience.
  • Proven software engineering experience building production systems, developer platforms, test infrastructure, automation frameworks, data pipelines, quality systems, or reliability tooling.
  • Ability to design and implement evaluation systems end to end, including task definition, dataset creation, harness implementation, scoring, analysis, and operational integration.
  • Demonstrated coding, debugging, system design, and operational excellence skills.
  • Experience working with structured data, logs, traces, metrics, APIs, automation workflows, and engineering telemetry.
  • Experience with LLMs, AI agents, model evaluation, prompt/tool orchestration, automated grading, evaluation harnesses, or benchmark design.
  • Experience with experimentation, statistical confidence, evaluator calibration, regression analysis, human-review protocols, or quality measurement systems.
  • Experience with security engineering, vulnerability management, SAST/SCA, SARIF, remediation workflows, secure development lifecycle, or compliance-sensitive systems.

Security 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.
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
Security Research 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.

What Microsoft employees say

Pay

Benefits

Hours and flexibility

Workplace

Get the full story on Breakroom

Microsoft logo

About Microsoft

Sourced by ZipRecruiter

Our infrastructure is comprised of a large global portfolio of more than 100 datacenters and 1 million servers. Our foundation is built upon and managed by a team of subject matter experts working to support services for more than 1 billion customers and 20 million businesses in over 90 countries worldwide. With environmental sustainability and optimization at the forefront of our datacenter design and operations, we continue to grow and evolve as we meet the ever-changing business demands that hold Microsoft as a world-class cloud provider.

Industry

Computer and computer peripheral equipment and software wholesalers

Company size

10,000+ Employees

Headquarters location

Redmond, WA, US

Year founded

1975

Social media

FacebookTwitter

View All Microsoft Jobs

Apply