Principal Research Engineer – Generative AI – AI Frontiers

The AI Frontiers lab at Microsoft Research is charted with ambitious research goals for advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities in several key areas including modeling, algorithms, reasoning and agentic AI. Our lab offers a vibrant environment for cutting-edge multidisciplinary research, including an open publication policy and close links to top academic institutions around the world.

This Principal Research Engineer position is a unique opportunity to contribute towards tackling some of the hardest and most rewarding challenges in AI. You will help develop novel ideas in bleeding edge reinforcement learning research as well as help evolve our pre-training, mid-training, and post-training codebases that gave birth to famous models such as Phi establishing many new records. You will collaborate with researchers and engineers across many disciplines to help advance the state of the art in reasoning and agentic AI.

Our lab provides opportunities for experimentation and access to diverse array of real-world problems and data along with potential to ship your research to over billion Microsoft customers. At AI Frontiers we strive to expand the pareto frontier of AI capabilities, efficiency, and safety through innovations in foundation models and learning agent platforms. Our projects include Phi, Orca, AutoGen, Eureka, OmniParser, Magentic-One, Magentic-UI, Dion, Belief State Transformers among many others.

Our ongoing research areas encompass but are not limited to:

• Pre-training: language models, action models and multimodal models 
• Mid-training: long context extension 
• Post-training: e.g., Instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from feedback  
• Reasoning: Enabling LLMs to scale inference time compute via reinforcement learning  
• Action Models: Trailing models capable of taking action in the digital world (e.g. computer use and web agents) 
• Orchestration and multi-agent systems: automated orchestration between multiple agents incorporating collaboration, human feedback and oversight  

If your skills and interests intersects any of these areas, please apply today and join us in this amazing journey!

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