Microsoft
Principal Applied Scientist
$143K–$304K
Redmond, WA +1 · On-site · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 25, 2026
- Location
- Redmond, WA
Mountain View, CA - Experience
- 6+ years with a bachelor’s degree, 4+ years with a master’s degree, or 3+ years with a doctorate; equivalent experience accepted. Preferred: 9+ years with a master’s degree or 6+ years with a doctorate, or equivalent experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent experience.
About the job
Leads scientific strategy and investigations to identify monetization and advertising fraud, reconstruct attacks, and turn findings into reusable signals, datasets, and tests for defense teams.
What you'll do
- Identify emerging fraud tactics, adversary infrastructure, and evasion patterns using threat modeling and large-scale analysis.
- Design safe adversarial simulations and build investigation tools, test harnesses, and regression scenarios.
- Lead incident reconstruction, establish validated ground truth, and guide scientific strategy across teams.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field and 6+ years of related experience, or master’s and 4+ years, or doctorate and 3+ years, or equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet required security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Nice to have
- Experience investigating adversarial abuse at web scale and producing rigorous technical assessments.
- Experience with large-scale detection methods and production data services; advertising or monetization fraud; adversarial simulation; or LLM-native attack surfaces.
Pay
USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year (base pay); USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year (base pay)
Tools
Python, Spark, SQL, OpenRTB
AI focus
Assesses threats in LLM-native systems and develops agent-assisted investigation services and tooling.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative