Senior Research Software Engineer

The Microsoft Research AI Frontiers group in Redmond is looking for a Senior Research Software Engineer to build state-of-the-art tools for evaluating and understanding foundation models, with a focus of real-world uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our team conducts influential research published at top-tier venues in AI and ML (including NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, and FAccT) and works within Microsoft’s Responsible AI ecosystem to impact our AI-driven technologies such as Azure, Office, and Bing. 

We are seeking candidates with demonstrated ability for technical work in the space of large foundational models with proficient coding and machine learning skills. The preferred candidate is: 

• Passionate about rigorous evaluation, understanding, and development of foundational models.  
• Motivated to make successful research methods accessible to the AI community through prototypes, open-source libraries, and development tools. 
• Proficient in design thinking and Object Oriented Design (OOD), building clean, modular, maintainable and user-friendly open-source ML
• Experienced in measuring and maximizing the impact of open-source libraries.

As a Senior Research Software Engineer, you will play a crucial role in designing and developing impactful, high quality and well-engineered frameworks to empower the scientific evaluation, understanding, and development of foundational models. You will work closely with a team of passionate researchers and engineers to make sure such frameworks are compatible with modern cloud platforms, Machine Learning (ML) frameworks and libraries, model architectures, and various data modalities. You will also play a central role in defining and running large-scale experiments that contribute to our team’s research. 

We are looking for a team player interested in developing next-generation platforms and tools for Machine Learning (ML) as well as conducting state-of-the-art research. Topics of interest include but are not limited to rigorous evaluation and benchmarking, advances in AI interpretability, bias and fairness, and safety in real-world deployments. Our group takes a holistic approach to studying foundational models that includes a variety of data modalities (language, vision, multi-modal, and structured data) and modern model architectures. Candidates should demonstrate expertise in many of these aspects or show that they are interested in generalizing their skills into a variety of modalities and architectures.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we’re dedicated to this mission across every aspect of our company. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. Join us and help shape the future of the world. 

Responsibilities

Collaborate with a dedicated research and engineering team to design and develop ML frameworks for model evaluation and understanding.  

- Define benchmarks and execute experiments for rigorous model evaluation and understanding. 

- System Design and Object-Oriented Design: Envision elegant solutions and craft scalable and efficient systems to drive the success of our Machile Learning (ML) frameworks. Develop clean, modular, and maintainable code to shape the foundation of our evaluation framework. 

- Work closely with partner engineering teams in both research and production.  

- Mentor or onboard incoming engineering contributors and empower them to maximize the team’s impact. 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience. 

• 3+ years coding proficiency in Python and familiarity with machine learning frameworks such as pytorch, tensorflow or scikit-learn.
• Experience with training and evaluating machine learning models for NLP, Vision, and Multimodal tasks. Experience with one data type is sufficient but candidates should be open to collaborating in projects that study a variety or a combination of modalities.
• 3+ years of industry experience involving cloud infrastructures and distributed ML environments.

Preferred Qualifications 

• Bachelor'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, or Python

o OR Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technic