Senior Researcher - Security & AI
Microsoft · Posted Oct 22
Software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and hardware services
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About the role
Microsoft Research India is a research lab advancing innovation across Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Theory, Technology & Empowerment, and Systems. This team pursues a research agenda at the intersection of security and AI, spanning securing AI systems (protecting data in AI pipelines, securing agentic and autonomous systems) and using AI to advance security (vulnerability discovery, attack understanding, and defences). The Senior Researcher will push the state of the art in security for emerging AI systems, pursue long-term research, and translate advances into systems deployed at Microsoft scale.
What you will do
- Lead research at the intersection of security and AI, spanning both securing AI systems and applying AI to security problems.
- Develop new techniques to protect sensitive and proprietary data in AI systems and pipelines, including training, post-training, reinforcement learning, inference, and agentic workflows.
- Investigate the security of AI agents and autonomous systems, including attacks arising from tool use, code execution, memory, external data, multi-agent interaction, and long-running autonomous behavior, and develop principled defenses against them.
- Explore how AI can help address security problems, including discovering vulnerabilities and attack paths, understanding complex security environments, detecting attacks and anomalous behavior, and developing effective defenses.
- Investigate new attacks enabled or amplified by advances in AI and develop robust defenses against them.
- Design rigorous threat models, benchmarks, evaluations, and experimental methodologies for emerging AI security problems.
- Form hypotheses, build prototypes, design experiments, and evaluate new security mechanisms in realistic environments.
- Pursue long-term research while identifying opportunities to translate promising ideas into practical security mechanisms.
- Publish at top-tier security, systems, cryptography, and machine learning venues, release research artifacts where appropriate, and help shape the research agenda in security and AI.
- Collaborate with research and product teams across Microsoft to translate research advances into stronger security for real-world Microsoft systems.
- Mentor interns and entry level researchers and contribute to MSR India's broader academic and research engagement.
- Embody our culture and values.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
- 1+ years of software engineering or research experience.
- Strong background in one or more areas of computer security, privacy, cryptography, computer systems, or machine learning.
- Strong research track record in security, cryptography, systems, machine learning, or a closely related area.
- Demonstrated ability to conduct independent research and communicate results through publications, prototypes, open-source artifacts, or other impactful outcomes.
- Ability to identify and formulate important research problems, develop novel technical approaches, and evaluate them rigorously.
- Ability to work effectively across disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with diverse research and engineering teams.
Preferred qualifications
- Research experience in AI security, security of LLMs, or security of agentic systems.
- Experience with security and privacy techniques for AI training, post-training, inference, or data pipelines.
- Experience in areas such as systems security, applied cryptography, privacy-enhancing technologies, confidential computing, access control, or secure machine learning.
- Experience studying adversarial behavior, software vulnerabilities, attack surfaces, or security of large-scale systems.
- Experience applying LLMs or other AI techniques to security problems such as vulnerability discovery, security analysis, attack detection, or defense generation.
- Experience building and evaluating large-scale security or AI systems.
- Experience designing threat models, security benchmarks, adversarial evaluations, or red-team methodologies for emerging systems.
- Experience working across the research-to-production boundary and translating research ideas into real-world systems.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
About Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a multinational technology company that develops, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products, services, and hardware devices. Best known for its Windows operating systems, Microsoft 365 productivity suite, and Xbox gaming consoles, the company has expanded heavily into enterprise cloud computing via Azure and advanced artificial intelligence solutions. As one of the world's most valuable public enterprises, it empowers individuals and businesses globally through innovative digital transformation.
- Industry
- Software
- Company size
- 228,000+ employees
- Founded
- April 4, 1975
- Location
- Redmond, Washington, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Leadership
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Vice Chair and President
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