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Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft· Applied Sciences
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Redmond, WA, Mountain View, CA$142.8k - $274.8kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

The Online Forensics team within Microsoft AI Experiences protects monetization networks by researching adversarial abuse at scale, building systems for experimentation and investigation, and translating findings into defense capabilities. The role centers on discovering how web-based monetization systems can be manipulated, implementing adversarial experiments, evaluating real-world applicability, and leading a portfolio of high-impact research with direct coding contributions.

Responsibilities

  • Discover and validate abuse mechanisms. Form original, testable hypotheses about adversarial manipulation of web and advertising systems and emerging LLM-native monetization flows. Investigate system behavior, service interactions, and economic incentives to explain how the abuse works.
  • Personally implement adversarial experiments. Build automated clients, instrumented browser workflows, simulations, and replay harnesses under safe, authorized conditions with clear scope and safeguards. Use appropriate controls and competing hypotheses to distinguish demonstrated mechanisms from unvalidated assumptions.
  • Develop rigorous evaluation methods. Assess whether experiments represent real-world conditions, establish the provenance and quality of labels, and measure generalization, coverage, false-positive risk, and robustness to adaptation.
  • Build durable research and investigation systems. Design, implement, test, deploy, and maintain the services, instrumentation, telemetry pipelines, and reusable libraries needed for the research portfolio. Turn successful approaches into reliable capabilities that other researchers and partner teams can use independently.
  • Connect experiments to real-world evidence. Apply behavioral, graph-based, temporal, and cross-surface analysis to large-scale telemetry. Identify adversary infrastructure and evasion patterns, determine prevalence, and quantify economic exposure while stating uncertainty and limitations.
  • Establish authoritative ground truth. Correlate evidence across accounts, traffic, transactions, providers, devices, and infrastructure. Reconstruct attack chains and produce reproducible datasets and technical assessments that clearly state mechanism, provenance, confidence, scale, and impact.
  • Translate findings into stronger defenses. Produce candidate signals, labeled evaluation datasets, monitored indicators, and reproducible regression scenarios. Partner with teams that own production defenses to evaluate improvements and verify that corrective actions address the demonstrated abuse.
  • Lead scientific and technical work. Set priorities for the research portfolio, guide experimental and architectural decisions, mentor others, and influence adoption across organizational boundaries while making substantial direct research and code contributions. When material incidents arise in the portfolio, lead reconstruction and turn findings into reusable evaluations and capabilities.
  • Embody our Culture and Values.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Master’s Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.

Skills

Required:Adversarial research and hypothesis-driven analysisExperimentation and simulationEvaluation and measurementSystem design and deploymentData analysis on telemetryGround truth reconstructionDefense-oriented translation of findingsLeadership and collaboration
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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