Principal Applied Scientist

OverviewWe are seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to join our Autonomous Defense and Protection Team (ADAPT), focusing on advancing AI-driven capabilities to enable autonomous defense through collaboration between blue and red teams. In this role, you will leverage LLMs and agentic systems to design workflows that empower autonomous agents to tackle complex security scenarios. Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires tomake 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. The Microsoft Security AI (Artificial Intelligence) Research team is responsible for defending Microsoft and our customers through applied AI innovation. 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. Defending Microsoft's complex environment provides a unique opportunity to build and evaluate autonomous defense through emerging generative AI capabilities. Microsoft understands and learns from its own defensive expertise, including via teams like Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), and has the opportunity to build a unique knowledge graph describing the relationship between risk, investigation, and response. This data, built over Microsoft's complex digital estate, along with Microsoft AI forms the foundation for innovative solutions to defend Microsoft. Your responsibilities include processing structured and unstructured data, fine-tuning models for security tasks, creating systems for synthetic data generation, and partnering with applied research scientists to build a foundation for training and evaluating agentic capabilities. You will also collaborate with security researchers to integrate AI and security expertise, driving innovation and advancing autonomy in security operations. 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. ResponsibilitiesCollaborate with security research teams and applied scientists to implement AI-driven techniques that address capability gaps and enable autonomy in security operations. Design and refine workflows leveraging LLMs and agentic systems to empower autonomous agents in analyzing and operationalizing insights from complex security scenarios. Build and optimize data pipelines to process structured and unstructured data, enabling context extraction and integration with other efforts to operationalize insights. Support the generation of synthetic data and simulation environments to train and evaluate agentic capabilities in real-world security contexts. Fine-tune and optimize machine learning models for security-specific applications, ensuring seamless integration into security workflows. Help define metrics and frameworks for evaluating autonomous agent capabilities, driving continuous improvement and alignment with organizational goalsOtherEmbody our Culture and Values