Principal Security Researcher

Job Description

Overview

Security 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. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

Do you have a passion for helping Microsoft’s clients defend themselves against targeted exploitation?

Are you interested in being intimately involved in the latest, cutting-edge developments in the security industry and having a direct impact on the security of all Microsoft customers?

Do you want to be on the front lines of helping our customers go toe-to-toe against advanced adversaries?

Are you interested in a fast-paced job full of new opportunities?

If so, you may be a fit for a Principal Security Researcher role for the Global Hunting, Oversight, and Strategic Triage (GHOST) team!

We are looking for a Security Researcher with engineering experience and strong analytical background to join our team. The role combines development of tools, engineering scalable systems, and using those systems to assist with investigations. By applying engineering skills as an active member on investigations, you will incubate investigation best practices from experiments to scalable solutions that can be applied to proprietary solutions, Microsoft tooling and products. Researchers will support a global team to identify and catalog new attacker TTPs, victims, to protect worldwide enterprise customers and empower customers to protect themselves via constantly improving Microsoft products.

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.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

This role is part of a collaborative team, assisting our customers with:

• Identifying potential threats, allowing for proactive defense before an actual incident
• Building proof-of-concept, prototype, and production-ready threat hunting tools, automations, and new capabilities
• Driving product and tooling improvements by conveying learnings from threat hunting and incident response at scale to engineering partner teams
• Monitor, maintain, and iterate on proprietary solutions that enable our team to threat hunt
• Implement security controls of relevant mitigations to defend against current and future threat landscape

• Professional experience with developing automation with at least one of the following: PowerShell, Python, Bash
• Contribute across teams in producing extensible, testable, and maintainable code

• Strong problem-solving skills, a passion for quality, and the ability to manage ambiguity, short timelines, and changing priorities
• Professional experience with Azure technology including but not limited to; EntraId, Azure Front Door, Networking, ARM Deployment, Logic Apps, Functions, Automation, Storage, Alerting.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years experience in software or systems development lifecycle and cybersecurity
• OR bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field.

Other Requirements:

Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• 7+ years experience in software development lifecycle and cybersecurity
• OR master’s in computer science or related field.
• Proven knowledge of security fundamentals across Microsoft platforms (Client, Server, Cloud)
• Familiarity and understanding of SQL or Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries (or experience with large database/SIEM query languages such as Splunk/Humio/Kibana, etc.)
• Familiarity and understanding of Jupyter Notebooks, or building equivalent threat hunting automations with scripting languages
• Experience with sophisticated threat actor evidence including familiarity with typical Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), Indicators of Activity (IOAs) and Tools, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs)
• Microsoft Azure platform knowledge and experience
• Familiar with various forensic log artifacts
• Familiarity with Microsoft security products stack
• Familiar with Windows, Linux, and/or macOS forensic analysis

Technical/Investigation/Cybersecurity/Digital Forensics/DFIR certifications

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.