Overview

Security is one of the most critical priorities for our customers in a world challenged by relentless digital threats, increasing regulatory demands, and complex technology estates. At Microsoft Security, our aspiration is clear: to make the world a safer place for everyone. We aim to redefine security by empowering every user, customer, and developer with a comprehensive security cloud—delivering end-to-end protection through simplified, integrated solutions. Our organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions by safeguarding digital platforms, devices, and clouds across diverse customer environments, while ensuring the security of our own internal estate.

We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join our team! 

The Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) Security Research team leads advanced research in Identity protection, leveraging next-generation AI and cloud technologies. Our team comprises globally recognized experts in identity and cloud-related threats—highly skilled, passionate professionals committed to driving innovation and safeguarding customers in an ever-evolving

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. 

Responsibilities

Develop advanced algorithms and innovative techniques to detect and defend against sophisticated identity-based attacks across the Cloud and SaaS ecosystem.
Partner with data scientists to build machine‑learning systems that identify anomalies, account compromise, fraud, and non‑human identity threats, leveraging GenAI and graph‑based approaches.
Identify and integrate diverse data sources, develop deep expertise across them, and surface new patterns and opportunities—communicating clear, compelling, data‑driven stories visually and verbally.
Analyze large‑scale datasets and build a robust, scalable feature‑engineering pipeline in a PySpark‑based environment.
Apply state‑of‑the‑art methods, algorithms, and tools from Microsoft and the scientific literature, evaluating scalability and applicability to the problem space and driving production‑grade solutions.
Collaborate across Threat Research, Engineering, and Product teams to define and instrument metrics that demonstrate product success (e.g., Detection Efficacy, Coverage, Time‑to‑detect).
Contribute to the security community through research papers, conference presentations, and technical blogs, advancing identity threat detection and response.
Provide subject‑matter expertise to customers on industry attack trends and product capabilities, helping them operationalize identity protection effectively.

Qualifications

7+ years of hands‑on experience with Spark/PySpark, Databricks, Azure ML, SQL/KQL, and strong programming skills in Python (plus C/C++/C as needed).
Proven ability to design end‑to‑end data and feature pipelines (SQL, PySpark, Azure Data Studio) that ship robust, production‑ready ML models.
Applied expertise in classification, prediction, anomaly detection, optimization, graph ML, and NLP. Experience with Generative AI (prompt engineering, RAG, fine‑tuning, responsible‑AI practices) is highly valued.
Proficient with relational systems (SQL) and big‑data stacks (PySpark); hands‑on with Azure data services (e.g., ADLS, Cosmos DB)
Comfortable working with complex, high‑dimensional, multi‑source data; excels at data wrangling, enrichment, and quality assurance to solve hard, real‑world problems.
Experience building and operating ML Model based solutions in cloud-computing environment like Azure or AWS or Google Cloud
Comfortable authoring technical docs, presentations, and blogs, contribute to papers or talks when appropriate.
Works cross‑functionally with Data Scientists, Threat Researchers, Engineering, and Product to define metrics, measure outcomes, and improve customer value. Communicates insights visually and verbally, telling clear, compelling, data‑driven stories to drive decisions.
Bachelor’s or higher in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or related disciplines.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.