Security Researcher II

Job Description

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.

Are you intrigued by clever side-channel attacks? Do you enjoy the challenge of picking apart complex real-world firmware exploits? Are you passionate about driving security improvements in our hardware fleet, firmware and virtualization space to protect billions of customers? The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) is responsible for detecting, protecting, and responding to threats that affect Microsoft’s products, infrastructure and services.

As part of MSRC, our team (Vulnerability & Mitigations) is looking for a motivated Security Researcher to join our team. In this role you will be s responsible for analyzing vulnerabilities found in Microsoft’s virtualization stacks, and hardware products to determine their root cause, severity, and security impact. This analysis plays a critical role in shaping the security updates that are deployed to our infrastructure and customers, and the knowledge that we gain from analyzing these vulnerabilities also informs the offensive and defensive security research we perform. As part of this research, our team works collaboratively with many teams without and outside of Microsoft to investigate, develop, and coordinate security features that help discover and mitigate these threats.

This is a unique opportunity to have a positive impact on improving safety for customers around the world and to work on challenging real-world security problems as part of a diverse, supportive and collaborative team.

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.

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

As a member of the MSRC team, you will play a vital role in enhancing the security of Microsoft infrastructure, products and services. You will have the responsibility to:

• Analyze critical security vulnerabilities reported by security researchers from around the world and provide guidance on remediation.
• Develop tools and techniques to discover and exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and services.
• Conduct penetration testing on Microsoft hardware, devices, products, services, virtualization stacks and cloud infrastructure to identify and report security issues.
• Innovate in security mitigations and hardening to make Microsoft products and services more resilient to attacks.
• Gain insights from incoming bug trends to inform security research for the team, as well as influence the broader Microsoft security strategy.

Qualifications

We are looking for a security researcher who is passionate about security research in hardware, firmware and virtualization platforms. You should have the following qualifications:

• Experience in software development lifecycle, large scale computing, modeling, cyber security, anomaly detection OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Risk Management, Cyber Security, or related field OR equivalent experience.
• Strong grasp security vulnerabilities, how they can be exploited, and how they can be prevented.
• Proficiency in developing tools and automation to identify or verify security issues.
• Ability to communicate and advise on security design and implementation for complex security challenges.
• Familiarity with publicly available security test tools and techniques.
• An ability to read and understand C and/or C++ code. Assembly is a plus.

Preferred Qualifications:

• A public record of vulnerability research and discovery
• An understanding of low level security issues that may arise in hardware or kernel components and their implications
• An understanding of how hypervisors and paravisors work.
  
  

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, 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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.