Microsoft · 3 days ago
Principal Research Engineer
Redmond, WA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$140K/yr - $275K/yr
6+ years expMicrosoft is a leading technology company seeking a Principal Research Engineer to set the technical vision and lead transformative AI initiatives. This role involves driving innovation at scale, mentoring senior engineers, and influencing cross-organizational strategy to deliver impactful AI solutions.
Agentic AIApplication Performance ManagementArtificial Intelligence (AI)Business DevelopmentDevOpsInformation ServicesInformation TechnologyManagement Information SystemsNetwork SecuritySoftware
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
Continuously review emerging work; identify high-potential methods and adapt them to Microsoft problem spaces
Turn research prototypes into production-quality code optimized for scale, latency, and maintainability
Own end-to-end pipeline from data prep, training, evaluation, deployment, and feedback loops
Build robust offline/online evals, experimentation frameworks, and telemetry for model/system performance
Operationalize continuous learning from user feedback and system signals; close the loop from experimentation to deployment
Design controlled experiments, analyze results, and drive product/model decisions with data
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
Start from the 'why.' Frame ambiguous needs into clear technical problems; define success by impact (e.g., reducing false positives that cost major customers)
Read, critique, and advance state-of-the-art; reason about guarantees and trade-offs; publish and teach
Turn ideas into robust, tested, maintainable modules (e.g., refactor prototypes into reusable PyTorch components; integrate CI/CD; cut latency by double-digit %)
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
Qualification
Required
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 Python OR equivalent experience
Preferred
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 L
Company
Microsoft
Microsoft is a software corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Microsoft has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (9192)
2024 (9343)
2023 (7677)
2022 (11403)
2021 (7210)
2020 (7852)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$1MKey Investors
Technology Venture Investors
2022-12-09Post Ipo Equity
1986-03-13IPO
1981-09-01Series Unknown· $1M
Leadership Team
Satya Nadella
Chairman and CEO
Vukani Mngxati
Chief Executive Officer - Microsft South Africa
Recent News
2026-01-16
Morningstar.com
2026-01-16
Company data provided by crunchbase