Security Researcher

Security 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. Do you enjoy the challenge of discovering and analyzing vulnerabilities in software and services to understand how they work and how an attacker might exploit them? Are you excited by the idea of analyzing real-world exploits and researching new attack techniques? Are you passionate about driving meaningful security improvements into products and services to better protect billions of customers? Do you want to be part of an inclusive & collaborative team that invests in the growth and success of one another?

The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) is responsible for detecting, protecting, and responding to threats that affect Microsoft’s products and services. We are looking for a motivated Security Researcher to join our team. As part of the MSRC, our team (Vulnerability & Mitigations Team) is responsible for analyzing vulnerabilities found in Microsoft’s products and services to determine their root cause, severity, and security impact. This analysis plays a critical role in shaping the security updates that are deployed to customers. The knowledge that we gain from analyzing vulnerabilities also informs the offensive and defensive security research performed by our team.

We regularly collaborate with many teams across Microsoft to investigate, develop, and deploy security features that help discover and mitigate the biggest threats to customers. Our research projects cover a range of topics including vulnerability discovery & automation, safer programming languages, exploit and vulnerability mitigations, software sandboxes, penetration testing & red teaming, exploit development, operating systems security (Windows and Linux), virtualization security, cloud services security, and hardware vulnerabilities and mitigations. This is a unique opportunity to have a positive impact on improving safety for customers around the world and to work on challenging real-world security problems as part of a supportive and collaborative team.

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. In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

• As a member of the MSRC team, you will play a vital role in enhancing the security of Microsoft products and services.
• You will have the opportunity to analyze critical security vulnerabilities reported by security researchers from around the world and provide guidance on remediation.
• Detect, reverse engineer and patch live exploits reported to MSRC.
• Innovate in security mitigations and hardening to make Microsoft products and services more resilient to attacks.
• Gain insights from incoming bug trends to inform security research for the team, as well as influence the broader Microsoft security strategy.
• Develop tools and techniques to improve vulnerability detections and assessment workflows.
• Work with and learn from experts across Microsoft and grow your career in security in a motivated and supportive team.

Qualifications

• We are looking for a security researcher who is passionate about security research in Windows/Linux platforms.
• You should have some of the following qualifications:
• An ability to read, understand and debug C and/or C++ code.
• Ability to communicate and advise on security design and implementation.
• Experience in security research on Windows/Linux systems.
• Knowledge of software security vulnerabilities, how they can be exploited, and how they can be prevented.
• Proficiency in developing tools and automation to identify or verify security issues.