Principal Hardware Architect

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

5h

About The Position

Do you want to be at the forefront of innovating the latest hardware designs to propel Microsoft’s cloud growth? Are you seeking a unique career opportunity that combines both technical capabilities, cross team collaboration, with business insight and strategy?
Join our Strategic Planning and Architecture (SPARC) team within Microsoft’s Azure Hardware Systems & Infrastructure (AHSI) organization and be a part of the organization behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission.
Microsoft delivers more than 200 online services to more than one billion individuals worldwide and AHSI is the team behind our expanding cloud infrastructure. We deliver the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's cloud businesses including Microsoft Azure, Bing, MSN, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Teams and Xbox Live.
The SPARC organization manages Azure’s hardware roadmap from architecture concept through production for all of Microsoft’s current and future on-line services.
We are looking for a Principal Hardware Architect to join our team!

Requirements

• Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 7+ years technical engineering experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience 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

• 15+ years of experience developing/architecting high end AI Accelerators
• Understanding of large language models, training and inference
• Knowledge of commonly used AI and HPC workloads and how they are mapped onto large scale systems
• Expertise in python programming and SW engineering
• Collaborative mindset
• Hands on experience with frameworks such as Pytorch/Tensorflow/TensorRT
• Deep knowledge of CNN/transformer architecture and optimization strategies – quantization, sparsity, sharding, KV Cache, Flash Attention
• Knowledge of inference stacks, like sglang
• Knowledge in developing kernels for AI accelerators / GPUs
• Programming skills in Python/C/C++

Responsibilities

• Analyze hardware architectures for AI workloads at system level and SoC level
• Architect large scale systems which support breakthrough performance for AI workloads to shape Azure’s AI infrastructure roadmap
• Benchmark GPUs and other AI hardware, with NN models and develop kernels for micro benchmarks
• Develop / enhance the inference stack architecture for optimal deployment of novel HW architectures and lead prototyping efforts to demonstrate feasibility and performance
• Understand business critical AI workloads/applications
• Drive NN model/HW codesign

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees