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Senior Researcher - Security & AI

Microsoft· Research Sciences
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full-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Microsoft Research India (MSR India) seeks a Senior Researcher at the intersection of security and AI to push state-of-the-art in security for emerging AI systems, conduct long-term research, and translate advances into scalable Microsoft deployments. The role emphasizes protecting data in AI pipelines, securing agentic/autonomous systems, and using AI to discover vulnerabilities and develop defenses, with collaboration across MSR India, Microsoft Research worldwide, and product groups.

Responsibilities

  • 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 from tool use, code execution, memory, external data, multi-agent interaction, and long-running autonomous behavior; develop principled defenses.
  • 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; 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.

Qualifications

  • 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.

Skills

Required:Research leadership in security and AIThreat modeling and experimental methodologyPrototype developmentCollaboration across teams

Benefits

  • Equal opportunity employer. See policies in the equity statement (provided in job description)
Last updated Oct 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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