Principal Software Engineer
About The Position
Microsoft Research is working to transform the future of artificial intelligence by bridging the gap between cutting-edge general AI and the specialized, real-world applications that drive meaningful impact. To pursue this mission, we’re building world-class AI infrastructure that not only powers our models on large GPU clusters, but also accelerates our research lifecycle through agentic development. Our team has a global scope, powering the work of every Microsoft Research lab around the world. We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help our research teams go from “what if” to “what’s next” faster and more elegantly than ever before. You will play a leading role in developing our infrastructure, platform, and systems’ architecture, strategy, and roadmap. You will wear multiple hats and work on engineering, research, and everything in between. Your contributions will span the full stack of design and development of supercomputer GPU clusters, workload optimization, researcher tools, agentic workflows, and many other exciting topics at the cutting edge of AI. If you're passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI and want to be part of a team that’s shaping the future of intelligent systems, we invite you to explore opportunities with us. 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.
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, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
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.
- Experience with distributed computing.
- Demonstrated experience designing/delivering platforms from concept to production.
- Experience building infrastructure for large-scale machine learning or generative AI workloads (including expertise in one or more of: Kubernetes, Docker, Volcano, SLURM, or similar).
- Experience building agentic workflows to automate AI developer inner and outer-loops.
- Experience in leading technical projects and supporting architectural decisions with data.
- Proven ability to profile, benchmark, and optimize large performance-critical systems.
- Track record of contributing to high-performance computing or large-scale AI infrastructure projects.
- Experience with GPU programming (CUDA, NCCL) and frameworks such as PyTorch.
- Deep expertise in networking (InfiniBand, NVLink), storage systems, or distributed training parallelisms.
Responsibilities
- Design, test and maintain large scale research platforms that drive our compute clusters, optimizing uptime and performance across diverse hardware.
- Develop end to end systems, libraries, and tools that accelerate the pace of research (including agentic development).
- Gather data and insights to develop the AI Infrastructure (compute and engineering systems) roadmap, identifying long-term investments and emerging technologies that will supercharge our systems.
- Provide vision, expertise, mentorship, and technical leadership to other team members.
- Collaborate closely cross-discipline with service engineers, product managers, and research and science teams to build better solutions together.
- Embody our culture and values
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
