Microsoft

Principal Security Researcher

Microsoft
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3 months ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
H1B sponsor

Base Salary

$143k - $304k/yr

Responsibilities

  • Conduct hands-on vulnerability research across vulnerability classes, languages, frameworks, and codebase architectures.
  • Discover and validate vulnerabilities, assess reachability and exploitability, and evaluate whether fixes correctly address underlying weaknesses.
  • Implement and measure improvements to MDASH agents, tools, model configurations, and analysis methods.
  • Create evaluation targets, trusted ground truth, adversarial cases, regression cases, benchmarks, and automated graders.
  • Build research prototypes, fuzzing harnesses, datasets, and automation for capability improvement.
  • Lead complex investigations, shape research direction, mentor researchers, and raise vulnerability research quality.
  • Collaborate with research, engineering, applied science, and product teams to communicate results and influence technical direction.

Requirements

  • A master's degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Risk Management, Cyber Security, or a related field plus 4+ years of relevant experience, or a bachelor's degree in one of those fields plus 6+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent experience.
  • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
  • 8+ years of experience in vulnerability research, application security, offensive security, secure software development, program analysis, or related security work is preferred.
  • Hands-on experience discovering, reproducing, and validating software vulnerabilities; assessing reachability and exploitability; and evaluating remediation correctness.
  • Experience with fuzzing and at least one additional technique such as manual code review, static analysis, dynamic analysis, debugging, reverse engineering, symbolic execution, taint analysis, or exploit development.
  • Proficiency developing security research tooling or automation in one or more programming languages.
  • Knowledge of multiple vulnerability classes and exploitation patterns, including memory corruption, injection, authentication and authorization, cryptography, deserialization, path traversal, server-side request forgery, and business-logic flaws.
  • Experience building fuzzing harnesses, custom mutators, sanitizers, coverage-guided fuzzing workflows, or large-scale fuzzing infrastructure.
  • Experience analyzing vulnerabilities across multiple programming languages and ecosystems, including C/C++, C#, Java, JavaScript or TypeScript, Python, and cloud-native applications.
  • Experience constructing security benchmarks, curating ground truth, measuring evaluation metrics, and translating root-cause analysis into generalized improvements.
  • Experience building and improving AI agents or agentic systems using large language models, including prompt and tool orchestration, model evaluation, automated grading, or reinforcement learning for security tasks.
  • Experience with static application security testing, software composition analysis, SARIF, secure development lifecycle practices, or developer remediation workflows.
  • A record of vulnerability disclosures, security advisories, CVEs, research publications, conference presentations, open-source security tools, or substantive security-community contributions.
Microsoft

About Microsoft

10,000+ employees

Microsoft develops operating systems, productivity software, cloud services, developer tools, and consumer devices for individuals, enterprises, and governments. Its main products include Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, Visual Studio/GitHub, Xbox, and LinkedIn; revenue comes from software subscriptions and licenses, cloud consumption, hardware sales, and advertising. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is a public company traded on Nasdaq.

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