Principal Security Researcher

Overview

Our team develops realistic, enterprise-scale environments that enable AI security models and agents to learn through interaction, evaluate their capabilities, and demonstrate measurable security outcomes. These environments support reinforcement learning for Microsoft’s MAI models, the evaluation of security perception agents, and the testing of software harnesses that provide agents with the tools, context, and execution capabilities needed to operate effectively.

We are seeking a Principal Security Researcher to lead the design, development, and evaluation of sophisticated enterprise environments spanning Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), on-premises infrastructure, and third-party technologies.

In this role, you will bring deep security expertise and technical leadership to the development of realistic environments that replicate the complexity of modern enterprise systems. You will integrate applications, identity systems, networks, operational workflows, and security telemetry to reflect the security challenges customers face. You will also help ensure these environments are reproducible, scalable, and reliably resettable, enabling continuous training, consistent evaluation, and controlled testing to measure improvements in AI models, agents, and their supporting systems.

Working closely with security researchers, AI engineers, and cross-functional engineering teams, you will help shape the technical direction of a reusable platform that supports advanced security research and AI development. You will take ownership of complex technical initiatives, from architecture and design through implementation, deployment, and ongoing operations.

This role offers an opportunity to work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems, applying your expertise to some of the most intricate problems in AI-driven security. Your contributions will help bridge the gap between performance in controlled testing environments and effective security outcomes in real-world enterprise environments.

Microsoft’s Mission and Culture

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.

Flexible Work

In line with our Flexible Work approach, for roles at Microsoft Germany, we recommend spending at least two days per week in the office or at the customer site.

Responsibilities

Build realistic enterprises. Connect applications, networks, identities, and third-party services across Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-premises systems, including realistic user activity and security telemetry.

Make environments repeatable. Build reusable infrastructure, images, and self-service automation to provision, validate, reset, and retire complete environments.

Enable AI training and evaluation. Deliver interfaces for agent actions, observations, and evidence collection so teams can reliably compare model, agent, and harness changes.

Engineer for safe scale. Support concurrent experiments with solid isolation, synthetic data, health checks, recovery, and cost controls.

Own capabilities end to end. Partner with security researchers and AI engineers to ship dependable systems, resolve cross-stack challenges, and mentor engineers.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

Extensive experience developing software, infrastructure automation, or cloud platforms.

Experience shipping and maintaining software or automation in Python, Go, C#, or TypeScript, using version control, automated tests, and code review.

Experience deploying applications and configuring networks, identities, and storage in at least one of Azure, AWS, or GCP, plus experience connecting services across a second cloud or an on-premises environment.

Experience building infrastructure-as-code modules and CI/CD deployment pipelines using Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, or equivalent tools.

Experience diagnosing Windows or Linux application failures involving DNS, routing, authentication, or service dependencies using logs, metrics, and system tools.

Experience owning a platform capability from technical design through deployment and operational support, including documenting design decisions and resolving production failures.

Preferred Qualifications:

Configured identity federation, certificate-based authentication, or workload identities using Active Directory, Entra ID, Okta, or another enterprise identity provider.

Built security labs or environment-as-a-service platforms with automated image creation, provisioning, baseline reset, and teardown.

Deployed Kubernetes workloads with network policies, service identities, and centralized logging.

Automated synthetic user or administrator activity and collected identity, endpoint, or application telemetry for security testing.

Integrated versioned environments into RL training or agent-evaluation pipelines, including checks for configuration drift and state left over from previous runs.

Designed and built capture the flag challenges or competitions.

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.

Security Research IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across Germany is € 113,300.00 - € 198,000.00 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.

Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/corporate-pay/germany-corporate-pay.html

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.