Principal Software Engineer, AI Knowledge

Microsoft CoreAI’s mission is to empower every developer to shape the future with Artifical Intelligence (AI). CoreAI is developing a new AI-first app stack, aligning infrastructure, platforms, and tools to support this mission. By providing developers with the right tools and resources, we aim to enable both Microsoft and our customers to unlock the full potential of AI in their applications and business processes.  We're hiring a Principal Software Engineer to join CoreAI.

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. 

Connecting AI systems with the right knowledge is a central part of modern application and agent platforms. Over the last two years RAG has enabled grounding for many scenarios, but as the questions get more complex and data volumes grow, we need continued innovation to create systems that can handle the needs of future applications and agents. 

The AI Knowledge team within Azure Foundry builds the knowledge understanding and retrieval systems for the Microsoft platform. We cover a wide spectrum of problem spaces, including internet-scale vector and hybrid search, state of the art transformer-based ranking models, unstructured content understanding and structure extraction, and more. 

We’re looking for experts in knowledge graphs, semantics, alternative representations, and adjacent topics, to join us in pushing the limit of performance for knowledge retrieval. 

This is an exploration effort and we’re looking for individuals that have extensive experience in the domain, have a demonstrated track record of being self-starters, are productive coders, understand the business backdrop in which technology exists, and are great team players. 

Responsibilities

• Help define technical strategy for innovation efforts related to information retrieval in agent-focused scenarios 

• Design and code prototypes that explore various approaches to various problems 

• Write production-grade code for capabilities we decide to productize 

• Understand existing systems, processes and teams within Microsoft, and integrate new work with existing work and products 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications: 

• 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.
• 5+ years hands-on experience working on knowledge graphs or other knowledge representations 

Other Requirements:

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.

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, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

• Experience building cloud-scale systems