Principal Applied Scientist

Overview

The Online Forensics team sits within the Microsoft AI Experiences organization, where we protect the monetization network that funds the products people use every day. Because attackers adapt quickly, effective defense requires discovering how systems can be abused, not just investigating known incidents. We combine hands-on adversarial research, controlled experimentation, and large-scale data analysis to establish authoritative ground truth and expose weaknesses before they are exploited at scale.

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will discover how web-based monetization systems can be manipulated and build the experimental and investigation systems needed to study that abuse at scale. Your research will cover both exploitable weaknesses and abuse of intended functionality, including automation, identity and attribution manipulation, and multi-step economic exploitation. You will personally write code, construct safe adversarial experiments, and combine experimental evidence with large-scale telemetry to establish mechanism, prevalence, and impact.

The scientific challenge is to distinguish adversarial manipulation from legitimate behavior under incomplete and potentially manipulated telemetry. You will develop methods to test competing explanations, determine whether experimental findings generalize to real-world traffic, and evaluate candidate signals without unacceptable false positives. You will turn validated approaches into reliable, reusable systems and evaluation methods that partner defense teams can adopt.

You will own a focused portfolio of high-impact research problems, from hypothesis through implementation, validation, and adoption. At the principal level, you will set scientific and technical direction while remaining directly involved in coding, experimentation, debugging, and delivery. You will own the research capabilities you build; partner defense teams own production enforcement and remediation.

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.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50-mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Responsibilities

• Discover and validate abuse mechanisms. Form original, testable hypotheses about adversarial manipulation of web and advertising systems and emerging LLM-native monetization flows. Investigate system behavior, service interactions, and economic incentives to explain how the abuse works.

• Personally implement adversarial experiments. Build automated clients, instrumented browser workflows, simulations, and replay harnesses under safe, authorized conditions with clear scope and safeguards. Use appropriate controls and competing hypotheses to distinguish demonstrated mechanisms from unvalidated assumptions.

• Develop rigorous evaluation methods. Assess whether experiments represent real-world conditions, establish the provenance and quality of labels, and measure generalization, coverage, false-positive risk, and robustness to adaptation.

• Build durable research and investigation systems. Design, implement, test, deploy, and maintain the services, instrumentation, telemetry pipelines, and reusable libraries needed for the research portfolio. Turn successful approaches into reliable capabilities that other researchers and partner teams can use independently.

• Connect experiments to real-world evidence. Apply behavioral, graph-based, temporal, and cross-surface analysis to large-scale telemetry. Identify adversary infrastructure and evasion patterns, determine prevalence, and quantify economic exposure while stating uncertainty and limitations.

• Establish authoritative ground truth. Correlate evidence across accounts, traffic, transactions, providers, devices, and infrastructure. Reconstruct attack chains and produce reproducible datasets and technical assessments that clearly state mechanism, provenance, confidence, scale, and impact.

• Translate findings into stronger defenses. Produce candidate signals, labeled evaluation datasets, monitored indicators, and reproducible regression scenarios. Partner with teams that own production defenses to evaluate improvements and verify that corrective actions address the demonstrated abuse.

• Lead scientific and technical work. Set priorities for the research portfolio, guide experimental and architectural decisions, mentor others, and influence adoption across organizational boundaries while making substantial direct research and code contributions. When material incidents arise in the portfolio, lead reconstruction and turn findings into reusable evaluations and capabilities.

• Embody our Culture and Values.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)

• OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)

• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)

• OR equivalent experience.

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 Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)

• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)

• OR equivalent experience.

• Demonstrated experience proactively identifying and investigating adversarial abuse at web scale through hypothesis-driven analysis of large-scale traffic or transaction telemetry and entity resolution across complex ecosystems.

• Demonstrated ability to produce written technical assessments that stand up to scrutiny, stating mechanism, evidence, confidence and economic impact clearly enough for engineering and executive audiences to act on.

• Demonstrated experience developing and evaluating machine learning or statistical detection methods on large-scale telemetry, including label validation and measurement of precision, recall, coverage, and drift; and shipping production services or data pipelines using Python and large-data tools such as Spark or SQL.

• Direct experience with advertising or monetization fraud ecosystems, including invalid traffic detection, OpenRTB and supply-path mechanics, click and conversion fraud, botnets, device spoofing, residential proxy networks, or synthetic identity abuse.

• Red team, offensive security, or adversarial simulation experience, with a track record of designing safe attack simulations and converting findings into reusable regression tests rather than one-off exploits.

• Working knowledge of LLM-native attack surfaces and agent-assisted analysis tooling, with experience in relevant methods such as structured threat modeling, graph analysis, anomaly detection, controlled experimentation, attack replay, FMEA, or STPA.

• Experience influencing outcomes across organizational boundaries, where the evidence you produce is acted on by teams that own remediation and enforcement rather than by your own team.

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Applied Sciences IC5 - 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. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

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. (