Principal Security Research - Microsoft Defender ( Identity Threat Detection and Response)

Principal Security Research - Microsoft Defender ( Identity Threat Detection and Response)

Israel, Multiple Locations, Multiple Locations

+5 more

Job description

Company and benefits

Job number

200044910

Date posted

Sep 23, 2026

Work site

3 days / week in-office

Travel

Less than 25%

Profession

Security Engineering

Discipline

Security Research

Role type

Individual Contributor

Employment type

Full-Time

Overview

Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end-to-end, simplified solutions across heterogeneous environments — and across our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and bringing our best each day to create innovations that impact billions of lives.

Come build one of Microsoft's most exciting security products: Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR). As cyber-attacks grow more sophisticated, we help enterprises detect, investigate, and autonomously protect against advanced identity-based attacks and data breaches — from nation-state actors to large-scale ransomware operators. Our research team combines deep knowledge of the attacker landscape and tradecraft to deliver the innovations needed to uncover and stop even the most well-funded adversaries.

We are seeking a Principal Security Researcher to set the technical direction for a critical area of our identity protection charter, drive multi-quarter research agendas end-to-end, and raise the bar of the team through mentorship and influence. You will partner with engineering, PM, data science, and other research teams across Microsoft to shape strategy, and you will represent our research externally through publications, talks, and industry engagement. We expect our Principal researchers to fluently leverage Generative AI and to actively shape how the team applies it — turning AI assistance into a durable force multiplier across investigation, detection authoring, and customer protection at Microsoft scale.

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

• Set the technical direction for a major area of our identity protection research charter, owning the multi-quarter strategy from threat landscape framing to shipped detection and measurable customer protection impact.

• Drive multiple concurrent end-to-end research initiatives, breaking ambiguous problems into tractable workstreams and unblocking the team on the hardest technical questions.

• Lead deep investigation and research of data across identity and adjacent sources to surface novel threats, attacker tradecraft, and detection opportunities others miss.

• Stay ahead of the evolving attacker landscape and design robust, sophisticated detection logics across the entire kill-chain — raising the bar on quality, coverage, and resilience to attacker evasion.

• Influence across organizational boundaries — partner with product management, engineering, data science, and peer research teams to shape product strategy, define new identity protection capabilities, and align roadmaps on a data-driv