AI Security Engineer

The Cloud & AI organization accelerates Microsoft's mission to secure digital technology platforms, devices, clouds, and AI systems across customers' heterogeneous environments and Microsoft's internal estate. Our culture is centered on a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and helping teams and leaders bring their best every day.

Microsoft Red Team (MRT) emulates real-world advanced persistent threats against Microsoft, external customers, and frontier AI systems. As AI systems become increasingly capable at reasoning, coding, tool use, exploitation, and autonomous execution, understanding when and how those systems materially increase offensive cyber capability is an important component of Microsoft's AI security mission.

MRT Strategic AI is seeking an AI Security Engineer focused on Cyber Capability Evaluation. This is a hands-on technical role for implementing and executing evaluations of frontier AI models and agentic systems in realistic, controlled cyber environments. The engineer will work at the intersection of offensive security, AI agents, model evaluation, and experimental engineering to build and maintain evaluation tasks, run experiments, analyze model behavior, and determine whether observed results represent meaningful cyber capability, an evaluation artifact, or a limitation in the test environment.

The role requires the ability to work independently within established technical direction, solve engineering and security problems, and contribute improvements to evaluation methods, cyber ranges, scoring, telemetry, and containment. The right candidate combines offensive-security experience with experimental discipline, programming skills, and an interest in emerging AI capabilities.

• Design, implement, and operate offensive cyber-capability evaluations for frontier, preview, production, and open-weight AI models.
• Build and maintain realistic evaluation tasks covering vulnerability analysis, exploit development, application and system exploitation, attack-path reasoning, post-exploitation activities, and multi-step offensive workflows.
• Execute controlled experiments using AI models; define success criteria and baselines; collect reliable telemetry; and document results.
• Analyze model trajectories and investigate unexpected behavior to determine whether it reflects genuine capability, task leakage, environmental flaws, scoring errors, or other evaluation artifacts.
• Develop and maintain cyber ranges, vulnerable applications, exploit-development targets, and evaluation harnesses, and apply security controls for sandboxing, secrets management, telemetry, access, and containment when testing autonomous AI systems.
• Partner with red-team operators, researchers, engineers, and Responsible AI stakeholders to translate evaluation findings into security insights, and communicate results through reports, documentation, and briefings.

Security Research IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $102,100 - $202,200 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 $133,800 - $219,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Security Research IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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.