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Principal Security Researcher

Microsoft· Security Research
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Redmond, WA$142.8k - $274.8kfull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Principal Security Researcher to build and improve the AI-powered, agentic system at the heart of MDASH vulnerability discovery, validation, and resolution. Hands-on vulnerability researcher focusing on hypothesis-driven research, tooling, evaluation, and improvement of MDASH agents and analysis methods.

Responsibilities

  • Conduct hands-on vulnerability research across vulnerability classes, languages, frameworks, and codebase architectures to discover and validate vulnerabilities, assess reachability and exploitability, evaluate fixes for security correctness, and identify opportunities to expand MDASH coverage.
  • Translate research and evaluation insights into implemented improvements to MDASH agents, tools, model configurations, and analysis methods, and measure their impact.
  • Identify representative evaluation targets and author trusted ground truth spanning vulnerability evidence, attack paths, severity, validation, and remediation.
  • Drive MDASH's eval-driven development and hill-climbing loop by running evaluations, uncovering patterns in missed and incorrect results, and creating adversarial and regression cases that turn blind spots into measurable capability gains.
  • Build research prototypes, fuzzing harnesses, datasets, graders, and automation that accelerate capability improvement.
  • Provide technical leadership across the MDASH security research team by shaping research direction, leading complex investigations, mentoring other researchers, and raising the quality of vulnerability research and implementation.
  • Collaborate across research, engineering, applied science, and product teams to deliver improvements, communicate results, and influence technical direction.

Qualifications

  • Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Risk Management, Cyber Security, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, or anomaly detection OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Risk Management, Cyber Security, or related field AND 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large scale computing, threat modeling, cyber security, or anomaly detection OR equivalent experience.

Skills

Required:Vulnerability researchFuzzingManual code review / static analysis / dynamic analysisSecurity tooling / automationReporting & communicationVulnerability classes & exploitation patternsMulti-language vulnerability analysis
Nice to have:Fuzzing harnesses / large-scale fuzzing infrastructureAI agents / agentic systems
Last updated Aug 6, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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