Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics (Software Systems)

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

1d

About The Position

Microsoft's Discovery and Quantum (MDQ) division develops AI, cloud-enabled capabilities, and strategic technologies. Microsoft Robotics within MDQ builds technologies that enable people, robots, and AI agents to collaborate. Its platform for physical intelligence integrates robotics AI models, teaming solutions, physically grounded agentic AI workflows, trustworthy testing and evaluation, and customer-focused validation to support reliable, scaled robotics deployments.

The Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics (Software Systems) will work at the Principal level, designing and building core infrastructure for the Microsoft Robotics platform. This includes SDKs, cloud services, edge runtimes, developer tooling, and agent orchestration layers that help people, AI agents, and robots operate together across mission workflows. The role makes foundational architectural decisions affecting platform scalability, partner integrations, and the composition and deployment of autonomy capabilities.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience coding in languages such as C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python; or a bachelor’s degree in a related field and 12+ years of such experience; or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years designing and building developer platforms, SDKs, APIs, or distributed infrastructure used by multiple teams or external partners, with ownership of cross-team technical decisions and architecture.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native systems engineering, including microservice architecture, Kubernetes and containerized workloads, service mesh, API gateway patterns, and CI/CD at scale, preferably on Azure.
• Proficiency in C++, Rust, or Go for systems-level components and Python for tooling, data pipelines, and ML integration, with high standards for code quality, testing, and performance.
• Demonstrated ability to make and communicate architectural trade-offs, with decisions that have held up at scale.
• Experience with ROS/ROS2, real-time systems, or edge computing platforms, including constraints of deploying software to physically embodied systems with strict latency and safety requirements.
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure such as model serving (ONNX, TensorRT, Triton), training orchestration, experiment tracking, or feature stores, particularly for deploying learned models to edge devices.
• Experience building simulation infrastructure, digital twin platforms, or CI-based testing pipelines incorporating physics-based simulation for validation and regression testing.
• Prior work designing multi-tenant platforms with partner-facing APIs, including developer portal experiences, API versioning strategies, and backward-compatibility guarantees.
• Understanding of agentic AI architectures, including agent orchestration, tool use, multi-agent coordination, and human-in-the-loop workflows, and their application to physical systems.
• Contributions to open-source robotics, cloud, or developer tooling projects, or published work on platform architecture, robotics systems, or distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement core platform components, including robotics SDKs, cloud-hosted APIs, edge runtimes, and agent orchestration frameworks for composing autonomy capabilities into deployable mission workflows.
• Design the platform's extensibility and integration architecture for composing, versioning, testing, and deploying autonomy capabilities, models, partner hardware, and customer-specific logic across cloud and edge environments.
• Build production-grade data infrastructure for the robotics lifecycle, including instrumentation libraries, data acquisition services, human-in-the-loop workflows, dataset versioning and curation pipelines, and data quality governance for real-world and synthetic or simulated data.
• Own cross-cutting platform concerns, including authentication and authorization across cloud-edge boundaries, API versioning and backward compatibility, multi-tenant isolation, and performance for real-time robotic control loops.
• Drive developer experience by defining the CLI, SDK patterns, documentation strategy, sample code, and inner-loop development workflow for internal teams and external partners.
• Collaborate with autonomy, simulation, and evaluation teams to ensure platform primitives meet the performance, reliability, and reproducibility requirements of ML training, sim-to-real transfer, and online evaluation workloads.
• Lead technical design reviews, write architecture decision records, establish platform-team engineering practices, mentor senior engineers, and raise standards for code quality, testing, and operational readiness.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal