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.

We are seeking a Senior Applied Scientist - AI Safety and Security to join a high impact team sitting at the intersection of cybersecurity and generative AI. As an applied scientist on this team, you will research, conduct experiments, train models, and develop technical innovation for detection of AI abuse as well as mitigations for threats like prompt injection attacks. You will work towards implementing and shipping state-of-the-art techniques for things like metacognition and mechanistic interpretability, partnering closely with our engineering and security research teams to help defend Microsoft’s flagship AI systems and Agentic products.

We are the Artificial Generative Intelligence Security (AeGIS) team, and we are charged with ensuring justified confidence in the safety and security of Microsoft’s generative AI products. This encompasses providing infrastructure for AI safety and security; serving as a coordination point for all things AI incident response; researching the quickly evolving threat landscape; red teaming AI systems for failures; and empowering Microsoft with this knowledge. We are a mission-driven team intent on delivering trustworthy AI and response processes when it does not live up to those standards. We are always learning. Insatiably curious. We lean into uncertainty, take risks, and learn quickly from our mistakes. Together we make a difference for all of our customers, from end users to Fortune 50 enterprises. Our team has people from a wide variety of backgrounds, previous work histories, and life experiences, and we are eager to maintain and grow that diversity. Our diversity of backgrounds and experiences enables us to create innovative solutions for our customers.

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.

• Advance the science: Design and run experiments, train models, and develop techniques and pipelines in areas like reinforcement learning, fingerprinting, meta-cognition, and mechanistic interpretability — all while upholding best practices in Responsible AI and Privacy-Preserving ML.
• Push state-of-the-art detection and threat hunting capabilities: explore and optimize detection approaches that enable investigators to do sophisticated searches for attack signature similarity and large-scale pattern matching or anomaly detection.
• Drive AI Safety and Security innovation: Partner with Engineering and PM to translate research into product and security platform vision, experimenting with new mitigation approaches like model activation analysis or drift detection.
• Collaborate across Microsoft: Work closely with Microsoft Research, Defender, Azure, AI platform teams, and product groups to bring cutting-edge AI into real-world applications.
• Stay ahead: Keep up with the latest research and foster a thriving applied science culture. Publishing is encouraged, though not required.

Embody our Culture and Values

Required/minimum qualifications

Applied Sciences 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 $158,400 - $258,000 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.

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.