Principal AI Model Security Researcher
Technology, Data & Digital · Data, AI & Analytics · Data Science · Machine Learning · Cybersecurity
In short
Microsoft Security is looking for a Principal AI Model Security Researcher to join a new red team focused on adversarial machine learning, model integrity, offensive security, automation, and privacy. The role involves conducting hands-on red teaming of AI models and their systems, designing attacks to expose vulnerabilities, and driving improvements through findings and actionable insights. This position requires a blend of scientific investigation and operational security expertise.
Responsibilities
- Design and execute white-box attacks against advanced AI models, checkpoints, post-training systems, reward functions, data pipelines and evaluation environments.
- Investigate adversarial behavior including jailbreaks, harmful permissiveness, reward hacking, deceptive behavior, capability elicitation, privacy leakage, data poisoning and model supply-chain compromise.
- Build high-fidelity experiments and automated attack suites that reproduce realistic threats and run continuously against new checkpoints and system configurations.
- Develop rigorous threat models, attack hypotheses and reproducible evidence; assess severity, exploitability and customer or governance impact.
- Partner with model scientists, engineers and product security teams to identify root causes and drive findings to verified remediation.
- Convert confirmed weaknesses into regression evaluations, adversarial training or RL environments, safety training data and stronger technical controls.
- Communicate findings and residual risk clearly to technical teams, leadership and independent reviewers.
Requirements
- Doctorate in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 4+ years related research experience OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 6+ years related research experience OR equivalent experience.
- Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements.
- Required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Desired Qualifications
- Hands-on expertise in adversarial machine learning, AI security, model evaluation, privacy attacks, offensive security or a closely related discipline.
- Experience designing experiments or security investigations that produce reproducible technical evidence and actionable remediation.
- Programming and research-prototyping ability sufficient to build attack tooling, evaluation harnesses and automated tests.
- Experience testing large language models, post-training or reinforcement-learning systems, agentic systems or AI-enabled security products.
- Knowledge of reward modeling, interpretability, capability elicitation, data extraction, poisoning, privacy or model supply-chain security.
- Experience with cyber exploitation, cloud or identity security, sandboxing, secure evaluation environments or offensive-security operations.
- Demonstrated ability to communicate complex attack paths, severity and residual risk to researchers, engineers and senior decision-makers.
- Experience converting research findings into production evaluations, mitigations, training interventions or security controls.
Benefits
- The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year.
- There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
Skills
Adversarial Machine LearningAI SecurityModel EvaluationPrivacy AttacksOffensive SecurityLarge Language ModelsReinforcement LearningAgentic SystemsData PoisoningCloud SecurityIdentity Security
#AI#Machine Learning#Security#Red Team#Adversarial ML#Model Integrity#Offensive Security#Automation#Privacy#Research
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Company
MicrosoftJob Posted
2 days ago
Employment Type
Full Time
Work mode
Hybrid
Salary
US$142,800–274,800 · Negotiable
Experience Level
Senior
Locations
Redmond, United States
Qualification
Doctoral, Master, Bachelor
Applicants
Be an early applicant
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