Principal Research Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

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. 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 PyTorch 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. 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.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
OR equivalent experience.
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.

Nice To Haves

Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
OR equivalent experience.
PhD in AI/ML or related field with top-venue publications and/or patents.
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.
Proven track record leading large-scale AI systems and cross-org initiatives that shipped.
Software engineering foundations and hands-on depth in Python plus deep-learning frameworks (PyTorch/ TensorFlow) and modern MLOps/tooling.
Experience mentoring senior engineers/researchers and influencing product direction through data and experimentation.

Responsibilities

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.
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.
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.
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.