Principal Research Software Engineer

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

Overview Microsoft Research (MSR) is a multidisciplinary global organization creating scientific knowledge and delivering innovation for positive human impact at scale. We work with scientific, engineering, academic, and business partners to apply machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to advance economics, health, and society. The Microsoft Research Americas Engineering team is hiring a Principal Research Software Engineer to provide technical leadership and direct technical contribution as an individual contributor on the AI Agentic Core Team. Our mission is to accelerate the path from research to product by building AI-driven systems, workflows, and platforms that help researchers and product teams move faster from exploration to real-world impact. In this role, you will collaborate with engineers, researchers, and product teams to build high-impact systems spanning early-stage prototypes through production-ready tools, services, and experiences, while modernizing how we design, build, evaluate, and ship software across Microsoft Research Americas and beyond. This role is well suited for engineers who enjoy moving across layers—from product experiences and services to data, cloud infrastructure, and AI-enabled workflows—and who are energized by applying AI to real engineering and product problems. Deep expertise in how models work is valuable but not required to be effective in this role. At Microsoft, our mission—to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more—guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress—people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what’s next for everyone.

Requirements

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, Python, Rust, C++, C#, C, Java, JavaScript OR equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Master's Degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, or a related field AND 10+ years of technical engineering experience OR Bachelor's Degree AND 12+ years of equivalent experience OR equivalent experience.
Experience applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) to real systems, products, or engineering workflows, with working knowledge of how modern models are trained, adapted, evaluated, optimized, or deployed, and the curiosity and ability to learn quickly across unfamiliar domains.
Familiarity with several of the following: agentic AI frameworks, tool use and function calling, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, model fine-tuning or post-training, observability, and AI-assisted code generation.
Demonstrated engineering fundamentals and broad technical range, with experience designing, building, and shipping software systems, taking ambiguous, early-stage ideas from prototypes through production across layers such as user-facing experiences, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and services, data workflows, cloud systems, and model integration.
Experience providing technical leadership across cross-functional efforts—defining direction, mentoring engineers, and driving execution on complex projects—and building systems that balance speed of experimentation with production requirements such as reliability, security, privacy, and maintainability.
Proficiency with a major cloud and AI platform stack; experience with Azure, Azure AI services, and Copilot-based tools.
Contributions to research papers, patents, or open-source projects at the intersection of engineering and research.

Responsibilities

Research-to-Product Engineering & Technical Leadership Design, develop, and ship systems that transition Microsoft Research (MSR) concepts into production-quality tools, services, and product capabilities, owning the end-to-end engineering lifecycle from prototype to scalable, maintainable software.
Build robust solutions spanning product experiences, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), data pipelines, model integration layers, and cloud infrastructure that connect research prototypes to real product environments.
Partner with MSR researchers and Microsoft product teams to align engineering efforts with research priorities, identifying reusable components and shared architectures that amplify impact across projects and labs.
Provide technical direction, mentor engineers, and guide architecture and design decisions, upholding best practices for code quality, security, privacy, testing, observability, and reproducibility.
Help shape the team's engineering culture, long-term strategy, and adoption of modern AI-driven engineering practices.
AI Agentic Systems & Accelerated Research Pipeline Define and implement AI-driven processes that accelerate how research moves into products, applying Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic workflows, and modern developer tooling to improve experimentation, implementation, testing, evaluation, documentation, and iterative refinement.
Design and integrate agentic AI frameworks and LLM-based pipelines into research tools and engineering workflows, building systems that coordinate AI agents for complex tasks such as code generation, evaluation, debugging, and refinement.
Develop tool-use and function-calling architectures that enable AI systems to interact with codebases, APIs, and data sources.
Apply modern AI engineering practices—including prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation, and evaluation frameworks.
Contribute to model experimentation and adaptation, such as fine-tuning, where appropriate to the project.