Overview

Role Summary:

As a Principal Research Engineer at Microsoft, you will set the technical vision and lead transformative AI initiatives that shape the future of Microsoft’s products and services. Operating at the intersection of advanced research, engineering, and product strategy, you will drive innovation at scale, architecting solutions that deliver real-world impact for millions of users. You will be a recognised technical leader, influencing cross-organisational strategy, mentoring senior engineers, and representing Microsoft in the global research community.

Mission & Impact:

• Define and execute technical strategy for foundational models, multi-agent systems, and next-generation Copilot experiences, especially within Business & Industry Copilot.
• Lead cross-team efforts to deliver scalable, reliable, and responsible AI systems.
• Advance the state of the art and translate breakthroughs into measurable customer and business impact.

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.

Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Vision:

• Architect and deliver complex AI systems across model development, data, infra, evaluation, and deployment spanning multiple product lines.
• Set technical direction for large programs; drive alignment across Research, Engineering, and Product.
• Integrate LLMs, multimodal models, multi-agent architectures, and RAG into Microsoft’s ecosystem.
• Establish best practices for MLOps, governance, and Responsible AI, compliant with Microsoft principles and industry standards.

Innovation, Research & Translation

• Drive original research and thought leadership (whitepapers, internal notes, patents); convert insights into shipped capabilities.
• Research Translation: Continuously review emerging work; identify high-potential methods and adapt them to Microsoft problem spaces.
• Production Integration: Turn research prototypes into production-quality code optimized for scale, latency, and maintainability.
• ML Design & Architecture: Own end-to-end pipeline from data prep, training, evaluation, deployment, and feedback loops.
• Evaluation & Instrumentation: Build robust offline/online evals, experimentation frameworks, and telemetry for model/system performance.
• Learning Loop Creation: Operationalize continuous learning from user feedback and system signals; close the loop from experimentation to deployment.
• Experimentation & E2E Validation: Design controlled experiments, analyze results, and drive product/model decisions with data.
• Model Optimization: Select and pursue the right leaderboards and benchmarks for our problem domain; tune/extend models to win where it matters and ensure wins translate to better UX and production metrics.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Influence:

• Broker collaborations across Microsoft Research, product engineering, and external partners.
• Mentor and develop senior engineers and researchers; foster a culture of technical excellence and innovation.
• Communicate technical vision and results to executives, internal forums, and external audiences.

Responsible AI & Ethics:

• Champion fairness, privacy, and safety end-to-end, design, data, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
• Create and drive adoption of internal policies, auditing frameworks, and tools for ethical AI at scale.

Operating Altitudes: Mastery Across Four Levels

• Business Problem & Customer Outcome: Start from the “why.” Frame ambiguous needs into clear technical problems; define success by impact (e.g., reducing false positives that cost major customers).
• Paper-Level Ideas & Math: Read, critique, and advance state-of-the-art; reason about guarantees and trade-offs; publish and teach.
• Code-Level Implementation: Turn ideas into robust, tested, maintainable modules (e.g., refactor prototypes into reusable Py Torch components; integrate CI/CD; cut latency by double-digit %).
• Systems & GPU Reality: Optimize distributed training/inference, GPU utilization, memory, and data throughput; engineer pragmatic interop across stacks (e.g., Python ML with C# services) to balance accuracy, latency, and cost.

What sets L65 apart: You operate across all four levels simultaneously, translating business goals into research, research into code, code into scalable systems, and systems back into sustained customer and business impact all while mentoring others to do the same and avoiding failure modes of being too academic, too narrowly engineering-focused, or overly high-level.

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or PythonOR 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:

• Bachelor’s in CS/EE/Math or related field + 10 years in applied AI/ML research and product engineering,OR Master’s + 5 years in applied AI/ML research and product engineering,
• OR PhD + 2 years in AI/ML or related field with a strong publication record.
• PhD in AI/ML or related field with top-venue publications and/or patents.
• Proven track record leading large-scale AI systems and cross-org initiatives that shipped.
• Solid software engineering foundations and hands-on depth in Python plus deep-learning frameworks (Py Torch/ Tensor Flow) and modern MLOps/tooling.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers/researchers and influencing product direction through data and experimentation.
• Experience architecting and deploying LLMs/multimodal models and multi-agent systems in production at scale.
• Familiarity with Responsible AI frameworks and bias-mitigation techniques.
• Demonstrated ability to shape product strategy and drive organizational change.
• Experience with Microsoft’s LLMOps stack: Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, Semantic Kernel, Azure OpenAI.

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Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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.