Senior Applied & Data scientist

Overview

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.

The Defender Experts (DEX) Research team is at the forefront of Microsoft’s threat protection strategy, combining world-class hunting expertise with AI-driven analytics to protect customers from advanced cyberattacks. Our mission is to move protection left—disrupting threats early, before damage occurs—by transforming raw signals into intelligence that powers detection, disruption, and customer trust. We’re looking for a passionate and curious Data Scientist to join this high-impact team. In this role, you'll partner with researchers, hunters, and detection engineers to explore attacker behavior, operationalize entity graphs, and develop statistical and ML-driven models that enhance DEX’s detection efficacy. Your work will directly feed into real-time protections used by thousands of enterprises and shape the future of Microsoft Security. This is an opportunity to work on problems that matter—with cutting-edge data, a highly collaborative team, and the scale of Microsoft behind you.

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.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Data Science, or a related quantitative field
• 6+ years of experience applying data science or machine learning in a real-world setting, preferably in security, fraud, risk, or anomaly detection
• Proficiency in Python and / or R, with hands-on experience in data manipulation (e.g., Pandas, NumPy), modeling (e.g., scikit-learn, XGBoost), and visualization (e.g., matplotlib, seaborn)
• Strong foundation in statistics, probability, and applied machine learning techniques
• Experience working with large-scale datasets, telemetry, or graph-structured data Ability to clearly communicate technical insights and influence cross-disciplinary teams
• Demonstrated ability to work independently, take ownership of problems, and drive solutions end-to-end

Responsibilities

Benefits / perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.Industry leading healthcareEducational resourcesDiscounts on products and servicesSavings and investmentsMaternity and paternity leaveGenerous time awayGiving programsOpportunities to network and connect