Principal Applied Scientist

Overview
Security represents the most critical priority 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 Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) Security Research team leads advanced research in Identity protection, leveraging next-generation AI and cloud technologies. Our team comprises globally recognized experts in identity and cloud-related threats—highly skilled, passionate professionals committed to driving innovation and safeguarding customers in an ever-evolving. We are hiring a Principal Applied Scientist.
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

Responsibilities
Lead independently projects focused on AI / Agentic research applied to cybersecurity problems aiming to translate ideas and prototypes into concrete product advancements or novel capabilities
Productionize AI & ML: collaborate with engineering and product teams to productionize models, pipelines, and meet objectives for latency, throughput, and availability. Develop fine-tuning techniques for transformer models and establish benchmarks for accuracy, robustness, and performance to ensure reliable model delivery.
Identify and integrate diverse data sources, develop deep expertise across them, and surface new patterns and opportunities—communicating clear, compelling, data driven stories visually and verbally.
Analyze largescale datasets and build robust, scalable feature engineering pipelines in PySpark based environment.
Partner with AI, Engineering and Data scientist teams to build machine learning systems that identify anomalies, account compromise, fraud, and identity threats, leveraging GenAI and graph based approaches.
Collaborate across Threat Research, Engineering, and Product teams to define and instrument metrics that demonstrate product and business success (e.g Detection Efficacy, Coverage, Timetodetect)
Embody our culture and values Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR
Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR
Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) 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

Proven ability to design end-to-end data and feature pipelines (SQL, PySpark, Azure Data Studio) that ship robust, production ready ML models.
Proven expertise in applying AI/ML systems and solutions to solve real cybersecurity problems
7+ years of hands-on experience with Spark/PySpark, Databricks, Azure ML, SQL/KQL, and strong programming skills in Python and/or C
2+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
3+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.
5+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
Comfortable working with complex, high-dimensional, multisource data; excels at data wrangling, enrichment, and quality assurance to solve hard, real world problems.
Works cross-functionally with Data Scientists, Threat Researchers, Engineering, and Product to define metrics, measure outcomes, and improve customer value. Communicates insights visually and verbally, telling clear, compelling, datadriven stories to drive decisions.
Applied expertise in classification, prediction, anomaly detection, optimization, graph ML, and NLP. Experience with Generative AI (prompt engineering, RAG, finetuning, responsibleAI practices) is highly valued.
Applied Sciences IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
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.