Cybersecurity Threat Hunter

Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions-Core (MCAPS) accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission, we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we win competitively, capture market share, and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class, AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen loyalty, and create sustainable competitive advantage, driving growth that outpaces the market.

Are you passionate about cybersecurity? Do you enjoy working on a high-performing, fast-paced team? If so, we are looking for you! The Microsoft Security organization’s mission of making the world a safer place has never been more important. As threats become more frequent and sophisticated, we must keep our customers safe through our Security Solutions.

With more than 45,000 employees and partners worldwide, the Customer Experience and Success (CE&S) organization is on a mission to empower customers to accelerate business value through differentiated customer experiences that leverage Microsoft products, services and partnerships. 

Microsoft's Detection and Response Team (DART) is seeking a skilled and experienced Cybersecurity Threat Hunter to join the team in the United States. DART is the first port of call for many customers during a security incident. This pivotal, customer-facing position identifies adversary activity, determines compromise scope and turns findings into clear response actions. 

You will lead hypothesis-driven hunts, establish technical priorities and act as a trusted technical partner for customers during urgent response activity. Working with lead investigators, infrastructure engineers, reverse engineers and incident coordinators, you will help customers understand adversary activity, visibility gaps and durable security improvements. 

As part of a globally distributed, mission-driven team, you will share research, mentor colleagues and help shape the future of Defender Experts Cybersecurity Incident Response.

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.

Lead security research across the threat landscape, using multiple data sources to identify vulnerabilities, track attackers, and guide priorities.

Strengthen security data quality and access while maintaining privacy standards and improving analysis through tools and AI.

Direct incident response and large-scale security reviews, identifying root causes, closing protection gaps, and keeping stakeholders informed.

Develop cross-functional solutions to prevent, detect, and disrupt attacks, incorporating customer feedback into mitigations and security practices.

As a Cybersecurity Threat Hunter, you will lead evidence-driven hunt workstreams across customer environments, identify adversary activity and communicate clear findings, confidence and response recommendations. 

Set hunt objectives, hypotheses, priorities and evidence requirements using threat intelligence, adversary tactics, techniques and procedures, and customer-specific risk context. 

Develop, test and refine hunts using large-scale correlation of endpoint, cloud, identity, network and third-party telemetry. 

Operate as a platform- and vendor-agnostic hunter across Windows, Linux, macOS, multi-cloud and third-party technologies, using the telemetry, forensic artefacts and security tooling required by each customer environment. 

Determine adversary presence, compromise scope and visibility gaps; establish what is known, what remains uncertain and what additional collection or analysis is needed. 

Author and optimize queries, automation and responsible AI-enabled workflows to improve hunt scale, analytical quality and time to detection. 

Convert investigations and research into durable detections, analytics, mitigations, threat intelligence and product or architectural improvements. 

Lead multiple hunt workstreams during high-impact incidents, coordinate priorities and dependencies, maintain evidentiary documentation and support post-incident and root-cause analysis. 

Brief customer technical teams, executives, internal stakeholders and partners with clear findings, coverage, limitations and response options. 

Provide technical guidance, share research and mentor other hunters while protecting DART information, tools and operational security.

Required Qualifications:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 4+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • 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:

• Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 3+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 6+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Computer Security, or related field AND 8+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, threat analysis or modeling, cybersecurity, vulnerability research, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience in threat hunting, Windows forensics, Linux or macOS analysis, or investigating identity-based attacks across Active Directory, Entra ID or other enterprise identity platforms.
• Demonstrated experience authoring queries against large-scale security telemetry, including scripting or automation.
• Ability to correlate and assess evidence from multiple sources, identify compromise scope, assess visibility gaps and clearly explain findings and uncertainty.
• Solid customer-facing written and verbal communication, including executive briefings.
• Flexibility to work non-standard business hours that may include evening, nighttime, weekends and/or holidays.
• Proven hypothesis-led threat hunting at enterprise scale, correlating endpoint, cloud, identity and network telemetry to identify adversary activity and visibility gaps.
• Advanced Kusto Query Language (KQL) skills, with ability to transform data at scale.
• Solid forensic capability across Windows, Linux and macOS, including analysis of endpoint artefacts and memory where required.
• Platform- and vendor-agnostic security experience across Microsoft, AWS, GCP and third-party SIEM, EDR, identity, network and email technologies.
• Experience leading hunt workstreams in high-pressure, customer-facing incident response while balancing the need for rapid recovery.
• Experience converting hunt outcomes into durable detections, analytics, mitigations and threat intelligence.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through research, stakeholder influence, process improvement and mentoring.
• Relevant security certifications or equivalent practical expertise.

Security Research IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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.