This role pays less than
51%
of similar roles. Most pay
$205,000–$255,500
— the shaded band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$209k
versus about
$230k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a global technology leader producing software, hardware, and cloud services including Windows, Office 365, Azure cloud platform, Xbox gaming, and Surface devices. Industry: Software & Cloud Computing
Microsoft currently has
598 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$119,800–$234,700
across 571 roles with salary data.
As a Principal Applied Scientist on the Online Forensics team, you will shape the scientific strategy for protecting monetization networks and LLM-native systems. You will identify emerging fraud tactics, adversary infrastructure, and evasion patterns through behavioral, graph-based, and temporal big data analysis. Your daily work involves forming threat hypotheses, designing safe adversarial simulations, and developing test harnesses to expose vulnerabilities before they are exploited at scale. You will establish authoritative ground truth by correlating evidence across accounts, traffic, and devices to reconstruct attack chains. To achieve this, you will utilize Python, Spark, and SQL while applying machine learning and statistical detection methods on large-scale telemetry. The role focuses on solving complex problems in monetization fraud, including invalid traffic, botnets, and synthetic identity abuse within high-risk advertising flows and multi-layered technical ecosystems.
What does a Applied Scientist earn?
Median $231000 from 40 postings across 11 companies.
Machine Learning
Anomaly Detection
Large Language Models
Deep Learning
Causal Inference
Statistical Machine Learning
Data Mining
System Design
Low-latency Pipelines
Experimentation Frameworks
Model Operationalization