The Principal Research Software Engineer role at Microsoft Research focuses on providing technical leadership and contributing to the AI Agentic Core Team. This position involves collaborating with engineers, researchers, and product teams to build impactful AI-driven systems and tools. The team aims to accelerate the transition from research to product by modernizing software design and engineering practices. Candidates should be passionate about applying AI to solve real engineering challenges and improving workflows across Microsoft Research Americas.

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years of technical engineering experience with coding in languages including Python, Rust, C++, C#, C, Java, JavaScript OR equivalent experience.
• 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.
• Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks, tool use and function calling, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, model fine-tuning or post-training.
• Demonstrated engineering fundamentals and broad technical range, with experience designing, building, and shipping software systems.
• Experience providing technical leadership across cross-functional efforts and mentoring engineers.
• Proficiency with a major cloud and AI platform stack, including Azure and Azure AI services.

• Design, develop, and ship systems that transition Microsoft Research concepts into production-quality tools and services.
• Build robust solutions that connect research prototypes to real product environments.
• Partner with MSR researchers and Microsoft product teams to align engineering efforts with research priorities.
• Provide technical direction, mentor engineers, and guide architecture and design decisions.
• Help shape the team's engineering culture and long-term strategy.
• Define and implement AI-driven processes that accelerate how research moves into products.
• Design and integrate agentic AI frameworks and LLM-based pipelines into research tools and workflows.
• Develop architectures that enable AI systems to interact with codebases, APIs, and data sources.
• Contribute to model experimentation and adaptation as appropriate to the project.

• Employees at Microsoft are often offered comprehensive, “world-class” benefits—including health and mental-wellness programs, competitive pay with bonuses and stock awards, and retirement/savings options. Time-off and flexibility are common, with generous vacation and holidays, parental and caregiver leave, and flexible work schedules, alongside learning support, employee resource groups, product discounts, and matching-gifts/volunteering programs. Specific benefits can vary by region.