Principal Security Research Manager

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.

Come and be part of the team building one of Microsoft’s most exciting security products, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE). As cyber-attacks have become more sophisticated, MDE helps enterprises detect, investigate, and automatically disrupt advanced attacks and data breaches on their networks.  Detecting and disrupting both nation state actors as well as advanced ransomware actors in action, our research team brings deep knowledge of the attacker landscape and tradecraft to create the innovation necessary to uncover and protect against even the most well-funded attacker.  The Microsoft Threat Protection Research (MTP-R) team is looking for a security research leader, who is passionate about building and nurturing highly talented group of security leaders and researchers to enable them build defences against large scale cyber-attacks. The job includes leading an organization of security end-point researchers on all platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS and mobile) to be part of visioning and building protection strategy for advanced endpoint security (EPP & EDR) for MDE to prevent and disrupt threats from adversaries, both criminal and nation state. 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.

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

• Create vision and provide direction to the security research work based on current security threat landscape and emerging threats. Drive teams to use results from research and experimentation to influence protection strategy against threats.

• Be a champion in providing thought leadership across teams to influence product roadmap and features by recognizing and conveying the impact of security problems and threats; drives change in protection strategy based on research findings.

• Provides direction and rallies the teams to ensure efforts are dedicated to prioritized security research workloads by effectively collaborating across teams, organizations and security leadership to align with Microsoft’s organizational and threat protection goals.

• Drive Microsoft to be a visible leader in security expertise; Enable team to contribute to professional community by publishing, creating and patenting IP, spreading awareness and maintain sustained interaction with industry and research partners (e,g., industry, academia, government).

• Build, nurture and retain security research talent; hold teams accountable to uphold and create new research standards; lead with empathy and growth mindset to build a healthy research organization; unblock researcher constraints and maximize researcher productivity.

Qualifications

• B. Tech. in Computer Science, Software or Computer Engineering, Cyber Security or related field.

• 10+ years of experience in cyber security with a background in the modern attacker kill-chain and MITRE ATT&CK (preferably in endpoint-based threat scenarios), cloud security, deep understanding of security threat landscape, compete scenarios, greenfield opportunities on prevention, detection and disruption techniques/features to thwart modern-day threats.

• 5+ years of people management experience (preferable manager of managers experience) in building security talent/teams, building security leaders and driving security strategy.

• Understanding of threats on mobile (Android & iPhone Operating System), Linux and macOS platforms is preferable.

• Malware reversing and analysis, signature authoring, detection engineering background, endpoint threat understanding is preferred but not must.

• Strong leadership competencies: collaborate across teams and security leaders to influence, strategize and execute plans; manoeuvre organizational complexities; attract and retain research talent; enable high researcher productivity and morale.

Other Requirements
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check:
- This position will be required to pass the Microsoft background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. 

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.