Senior Researcher - Security & AI

Job Title: Senior Researcher - Security & AI Company: Microsoft Job Category: Machine Learning Roles & Responsibilities: Microsoft Research India (MSR India) is a leading research lab advancing innovation across research areas like Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Theory, Technology & Empowerment, and Systems. The lab was established two decades ago and has been at the forefront of computer science research in India, home to world-class talent and projects. Our team is pursuing an Growth-orientedresearch agenda at the intersection of security and AI, spanning both securing AI systems and using AI to advance security. Our research includes protecting sensitive data throughout AI pipelines, securing agentic and autonomous systems against new classes of attacks, developing principled defences for AI-enabled systems, and using AI to discover vulnerabilities, understand complex attack surfaces, and develop new security defences. * Have a strong research track record, demonstrated through publications at top venues such as IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS, or other leading security, systems, cryptography, or machine learning venues Responsibilities Responsibilities * Lead research at the intersection of security and AI, spanning both securing AI systems and applying AI to security problems. * Develop new techniques to protect sensitive and proprietary data in AI systems and pipelines, including training, post-training, reinforcement learning, inference, and agentic workflows. * Investigate the security of AI agents and autonomous systems, including attacks arising from tool use, code execution, memory, external data, multi-agent interaction, and long-running autonomous behavior, and develop principled defenses against them. * Explore how AI can help address security problems, including discovering vulnerabilities and attack paths, understanding complex security environments, detecting attacks and anomalous behavior, and developing effective defenses. * Investigate new attacks enabled or amplified by advances in AI and develop robust defenses against them. * Ability to identify and formulate important research problems, develop novel technical approaches, and evaluate them rigorously. Work Location: Karnataka, India Availability: Full time

Qualifications Required Qualifications * PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience. * 1+ years of software engineering or research experience. Preferred Qualifications * Research experience in AI security, security of LLMs, or security of agentic systems. * Experience with security and privacy techniques for AI training, post-training, inference, or data pipelines. * Experience in areas such as systems security, applied cryptography, privacy-enhancing technologies, confidential computing, access control, or secure machine learning. * Experience studying adversarial behavior, software vulnerabilities, attack surfaces, or security of large-scale systems. * Experience applying LLMs or other AI techniques to security problems such as vulnerability discovery, security analysis, attack detection, or defense generation. * Experience building and evaluating large-scale security or AI systems. * Experience designing threat models, security benchmarks, adversarial evaluations, or red-team methodologies for emerging systems. * Experience working across the research-to-production boundary and translating research ideas into real-world systems. Key Skills: Machine Learning Salary: Not disclosed