Microsoft

Senior Research Engineer - AI Security

Microsoft • $119K — $234K *
Redmond, WA 98052In-Person
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Today
Be an Early Applicant
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field with 4+ years of coding experience in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or equivalent experience.
  • Preferred Master’s Degree in Computer Science or related field and 6+ years coding experience; or a Bachelor's Degree with 8+ years of technical engineering experience; or equivalent experience.
  • 4+ years hands-on experience in building and shipping production ML systems, including classification, detection, and decision-making systems.
  • Experience with adversarial testing, evaluation frameworks, and telemetry pipelines in ML contexts.
  • Foundational knowledge in ML techniques such as anomaly detection and model evaluation, with a focus on security challenges.
  • Competence in designing end-to-end ML pipelines, from data collection and training to deployment and monitoring.
  • Strong communication skills to articulate complex ML and security concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

  • Design, deploy, and operate production-scale ML systems focused on security enhancements for Copilot.
  • Develop detection and policy models that adapt to evolving attacker behaviors in AI security scenarios.
  • Build and maintain evaluation frameworks for AI security including adversarial testing and robustness measurements.
  • Define success metrics and lead rigorous experimental assessment of ML model effectiveness and user experience impacts.
  • Collaborate with security and engineering teams to integrate ML defenses into secure orchestration systems.
  • Monitor telemetry and analyze model performance to improve accuracy and reduce false positives/negatives.
  • Work cross-functionally with product, privacy, and AI platform teams to implement security patterns across Microsoft Copilot.
  • Document and share applied ML security techniques to establish organizational best practices.

Benefits

  • Access to ongoing professional development and training opportunities.
  • Collaborative work environment with cross-functional teams.
  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI security technologies.
  • Possibility for career advancement in a leading tech company.
  • Participate in a mission-driven role that focuses on user safety and trust.
Full Job Description
Overview

We are looking for a Senior Research Engineer (Machine Learning Engineer) who is passionate about translating research ideas into scalable, reliable ML systems. This role is ideal for candidates with strong engineering fundamentals and experience in the security domain and working with machine learning systems, along with an interest in prototyping, experimentation, and system-building. You will partner closely with Applied Scientists, Software Engineers, Product Managers, and Data Scientists to bring AI innovations into production reality and deliver reliable, high-performing security solutions for Copilot.

In this role, you will spend much of your time defining threat scenarios, building datasets and evaluation loops, training or tuning detection and classification models, integrating defenses into production services, and using telemetry to improve precision and recall over time. Your work will directly shape the security posture for Copilot and contribute to the necessary systems and guardrails for Copilot to operate safely and earn user trust at global scale.

Responsibilities
  • Design, deploy, and operate production-scale ML systems that protect Copilot experiences, ensuring high reliability, performance, and security at global scale, targeting threats such as prompt injections, adversarial inputs, and agentic workflow abuse.
  • Develop adaptive detection and policy models that are capable of learning from evolving attacker behavior to offer durable protection against emerging AI security threats.
  • Build and own evaluation frameworks for AI security, including adversarial testing, red-teaming support, and continuous robustness measurement across real Copilot scenarios.
  • Define success metrics and conduct rigorous experimentation to quantify security effectiveness, adversarial robustness, precision/recall tradeoffs, and user experience impact.
  • Partner with security and engineering teams to integrate ML defenses into secure orchestration frameworks that govern agent delegation, tool calling, and action execution.
  • Monitor and analyze telemetry to improve model performance, reduce false positives/negatives, and guide iterative defense improvements.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with product, privacy, and AI platform teams to land agentic security patterns across Microsoft Copilot ecosystem.
  • Document and share applied ML security techniques, helping establish best practices for secure agentic AI across Microsoft.
  • On-call Engineering Duties


Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
    • 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 Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:
  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
    • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
    • OR equivalent experience.
  • 4+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping machine learning, detection, ranking, classification, or data-driven decision systems in production.
  • Experience building systems related to adversarial testing, evaluation frameworks, telemetry/observability pipelines, or risk-measurement infrastructure.
  • Solid foundation in ML fundamentals, including classification, anomaly detection, representation learning, and model evaluation.
  • Experience designing end to end ML pipelines: data collection, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
  • Understanding of agentic AI risks (e.g., jailbreaks, prompt injection, toolchain misuse) and threat-driven engineering.
  • Experience working on AI safety, trust, or security adjacent ML problems, including prompt injection, abuse detection, or adversarial ML.
  • Familiarity with distributed systems, cloud-based services, secure system design patterns, or security-sensitive production environments.
  • Ability to clearly communicate complex ML and security concepts to engineering and non ML stakeholders.

#Copilot, #LLM, #Agent, #AI Security

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 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.

About Microsoft

Microsoft is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services. Microsoft’s devices and consumer (D&C) licensing segment licenses the Windows operating system and related software, Microsoft Office for consumers, and the Windows Phone operating system. The company’s computing and gaming hardware segment provides Xbox gaming and entertainment consoles and accessories, second-party and third-party video games, and Xbox Live subscriptions; surface devices and accessories; and Microsoft PC accessories. Its phone hardware segment offers Lumia smartphones and other non-Lumia phones. Its D&C segment provides Windows Store, Xbox Live transactions, and Windows phone store; search advertising; display advertising; Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal; first-party video games; and other consumer products and services as well as operating retail stores. Microsoft’s commercial licensing segments license server products, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (CALs); Windows Embedded; Windows operating system; Microsoft Office for business, including Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and related CALs; Microsoft Dynamics business solutions; and Skype. Its commercial segment offers enterprise services, including premier support services and Microsoft consulting services; commercial cloud comprising Office 365 Commercial, other Microsoft Office online offerings, Dynamics CRM Online, and Microsoft Azure; and other commercial products and online services. The company markets and distributes its products through original equipment manufacturers, distributors, and resellers, as well as online.

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Learn more about Microsoft
Size
181,000 employees
Market Cap
$1,762.4 billion
Industry
Enterprise Technology
Net Income
$51.3 billion
Founded
1975
5 Year Trend
+15.5%
Revenue
$153.2 billion
NASDAQ
MSFT
* Ladders Estimates

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