Security Researcher II - MSRC

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.

The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) is responsible for detecting, protecting, and responding to threats that affect Microsoft’s products and services. We are looking for a motivated Security Researcher II to join our team. As part of the MSRC, our team is responsible for analyzing vulnerabilities found in Microsoft’s products and services to determine their root cause, severity, and security impact. This analysis plays a critical role in shaping the security updates that are deployed to customers. The knowledge that we gain from analyzing vulnerabilities also informs the offensive and defensive security research performed by our team. As part of this research, our team works collaboratively with many teams across Microsoft to investigate, develop, and deploy security features that help discover and mitigate the biggest threats to customers.

Our team is passionate about a range of topics including vulnerability discovery & automation, safer programming languages, exploit and vulnerability mitigations, software sandboxes, penetration testing & red teaming, exploit development, operating systems security (Windows and Linux), virtualization security, cloud services security, OWASP top 10, and hardware vulnerabilities and mitigations.

This particular role is focused on the online services (OLS), e.g. cloud and web bugs. 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 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. 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

• Analyzing vulnerabilities in software and services to determine their root cause, severity, and security impact Identifying variants of vulnerabilities and discovering new vulnerabilities
• Building tools and inventing new approaches to automate the discovery & analysis of vulnerabilities
• Analyzing trends in vulnerabilities being discovered to spot patterns
• Researching, developing, and deploying mitigations for common patterns of vulnerabilities
• Performing penetration testing, offensive security research, and red teaming activities
• Engaging with and contributing knowledge back to the security research community
• Mentoring and contributing to the growth of individuals within the team and across Microsoft
• Supporting a healthy and inclusive culture within the team and across Microsoft
  

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field and experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection
• In-depth experience in working as a security engineer
• Experience in identifying common vulnerability types (OWASP top 10, CWE top 25) in software and services written in C#, JavaScript/HTML, C++, C, etc
• Ability to debug and root cause vulnerabilities in software, services, and cloud platforms
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Public track record of vulnerability research and discovery
• Familiarity with cloud service architectures (Azure etc), design, and implementations
• Familiarity with operating system internals for Windows and/or Linux Familiarity with exploitation techniques and mitigations
• Experience developing software using C#, Python, HTML/JS, C++/C, Rust, Go, etc
• Familiarity with hardware architectures such as x86-64 and AArch64
• Experience with reverse engineering binaries and exploits, though this role is mostly web/cloud/api focused
  

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.

#MSRC

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.