Senior Security Researcher

Overview

Security is one of the most critical priorities for our customers in a world of growing digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world safer by empowering every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that delivers end-to-end, simplified protection. The Microsoft Security organization advances this mission by helping secure digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds across customers' heterogeneous environments, while also protecting Microsoft's internal estate.

Our culture is grounded in a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and enabling teams and leaders to bring their full potential each day.

The Microsoft Threat Protection Research (MTP-R) Purple Team sits at the intersection of offense, defense, and intelligence, working across Microsoft Defender technologies to ensure telemetry, detections, and protections are effective against real-world cyberattacks. We are looking for a senior-level red team security researcher with experience in adversary emulation, offensive tooling, and malware development to design and execute realistic attack simulations in an AI-first environment.

This role will use agentic systems and LLM-driven workflows to scale attack development, automation, and simulation fidelity, while helping shape how AI-enabled offensive research is used to emulate modern adversaries in controlled, high-impact ways.

Responsibilities

As a Senior Security Researcher on the MTP Research Purple Team, you will:

* Design and execute adversary simulations that emulate real-world threat actors across endpoint, identity, cloud, and SaaS environments.

* Develop and modify offensive tooling, including custom payloads, loaders, and command-and-control (C2) frameworks.

* Conduct malware development and tradecraft research to replicate modern attacker techniques such as evasion, persistence, and lateral movement.

* Leverage threat intelligence to inform adversary emulation scenarios, including campaign design, TTP selection, and operational sequencing.

* Apply threat modeling frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK to emulate realistic attack paths and identify defensive gaps.

* Utilize AI-enabled and agentic systems to generate attack variations, automate tradecraft execution, and scale simulation coverage.

* Partner with blue team and detection engineering teams to validate detections and improve defensive capabilities.

* Analyze telemetry generated from simulations to assess detection coverage and identify opportunities for improvement.

* Contribute to simulation reports, technical documentation, and internal knowledge sharing.

* Collaborate across teams to improve offensive tooling, methodologies, and research practices.

Qualifications

Minimum 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.

Other Requirements:

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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

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…