About the job
As a Senior Data Scientist, you will design, build, and ship production machine learning and applied AI systems, including classical ML detections and emerging LLM- and agent-based protections that stop malicious actors targeting billions of Microsoft customers. You will own problems end-to-end: framing the detection question, exploring telemetry at scale, building and evaluating models, driving them into production, and monitoring their real-world impact. You will partner closely with software engineering, product management and security researchers.
Responsibilities
Design, develop, evaluate, and ship production ML models and applied AI systems (including LLM- and agent-based approaches) for compromise detection, fraud, and anti-abuse scenarios.
Own detection problems end-to-end: problem framing, data exploration, feature engineering, modeling, offline/online evaluation, deployment, and post-launch monitoring.
Analyze large-scale identity and security telemetry to identify attacker behavior, quantify risk, and uncover new detection opportunities.
Define and run rigorous experiments (e.g., A/B tests, shadow evaluations) and establish quality, monitoring, and responsible-AI standards for the models you own.
Partner with engineering to ensure models are scalable, reliable, observable, and maintainable in production.
Collaborate with product management, security researchers, and partner teams to translate ambiguous security problems into clear metrics, roadmaps, and shipped solutions.
Communicate insights, results, and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders, using strong data storytelling and visualization.
Contribute to the technical growth of the team through design reviews, mentoring, and raising the engineering and science bar.
Qualifications
Minimum
Bachelor'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 Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.
Other RequirementsAbility 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 background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Preferred
Demonstrated experience delivering ML models into production in partnership with software/data engineering teams.
Strong programming skills in Python and experience with large-scale data processing (e.g., Apache Spark, SQL) on cloud-based platforms.
Solid foundation in machine learning, statistical modeling, and experimentation methodology. Proven ability to operate independently in ambiguous problem spaces and drive work to shipped outcomes.
Experience applying data science / ML to security, fraud, abuse, or risk detection domains.
Experience with