Principal Applied Scientist - Security AI Models

OverviewSecurity 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. The Security Models Training team builds and operates the large-scale AI training and adaptation engines that power Microsoft Security products, turning cutting-edge research into dependable, production-ready capabilities. As a Principal Applied Scientist - Security AI Models, you will lead end-to-end model development for security scenarios, including privacy-aware data curation, continual pretraining, task-focused fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and rigorous evaluation. You will drive training efficiency on distributed GPU systems, deepen model reasoning and tool-use skills, and embed responsible AI and compliance into every stage of the workflow. The role is hands-on and impact-focused, partnering closely with engineering and product to translate innovations into shipped experiences, designing objective benchmarks and quality gates, and mentoring scientists and engineers to scale results across globally distributed teams. You will combine strong coding and experimentation with a systems mindset to accelerate iteration cycles, improve throughput and reliability, and help shape the next generation of secure, trustworthy AI 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.

ResponsibilitiesExecute the full modeling lifecycle for security scenarios from data ingestion and curation to training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoringDesign and operate privacy-preserving data workflows, including anonymization, templating, synthetic augmentation, and quantitative utility measurementDevelop and maintain fine-tuning and adaptation recipes for transformer models, including parameter-efficient methods and reinforcement learning from human or synthetic feedbackContribute to objective benchmarks, metrics, and automated gates for accuracy, robustness, safety, and performance to enable repeatable model shippingCollaborate with engineering and product teams to productionize models, harden pipelines, and meet service-level objectives for latency, throughput, and availabilityUphold high-quality documentation and experiment hygiene and foster a culture of rapid iteration grounded in responsible AI principlesStay current with the latest AI advances and help translate promising techniques into practical, measurable impact