Principal Security Research Manager

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.

Generative AI is changing the very nature of the security landscape, with both attackers and defenders leveraging generative AI to scale, automate, and improve their capabilities. Our team is harnessing this adversarial AI approach to improve AI blue team agents by competing against AI red teams in simulation environments indistinguishable from real customer networks. Through these wargames, AI blue team agents learn and improve via thousands of different environments and attack scenarios with ever increasing challenge and complexity.

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.

Responsibilities: We are looking for someone to lead our simulation team, responsible for building the simulation environment and capture-the-flag (CTF) challenges that comprise the game board for AI red versus AI blue.

• Lead a multi-disciplinary team including security researchers, applied scientists, and engineers to design and implement large-scale virtual environments representing real world network design, breach paths, and benign traffic patterns
• Design and plant end-to-end CTF challenges within these environments, working together with our larger team to challenge and grow both AI red team and AI blue team capabilities
• Partner with research and engineering to implement agentic wargames and self-driven learning approaches, improving both AI red and AI blue team solutions

Minimum Qualifications:
* Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
OR equivalent experience.
* 1+ year(s) people management 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:
* Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 5+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 12+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection.
OR equivalent experience.
* 3+ years people management and/or informal/indirect team leadership experience.
* 8+ years of computer security industry experience with knowledge of adversary tradecraft, security operations, incident response, threat hunting, and of emerging threats and techniques for attacks against modern cloud environments.
* 6+ years of experience researching, prototyping, and authoring threat detection or remediation in live production environments.
* Hands on experience with generative AI including building agentic systems, vibe-coding, or model benchmarking/fine-tuning
* Code fluency in either C/C++, Java, Python, or Rust.
* Experience collaborating with external partners, customers, or cross-functional teams.
* Experience designing large-scale simulation environments or CTF challenges.
* Hands on experience deploying and maintaining cloud environments, tenants, or subscriptions in Azure.

#MSFTSecurity #MSECAI #ADAPT

Security Research M5 - 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.