Member of Technical Staff, Inference Systems Research (AI)

Location: Mountain View, United States. Employees living within 50 miles of a U.S. Microsoft office are expected to work from a designated office at least four days per week.

Salary: USD $142,800–$274,800 base pay per year across the U.S.; USD $188,000–$304,200 per year in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area.

Company

Microsoft AI is a startup-like organization within Microsoft focused on advancing safe, responsible, and human-centered artificial intelligence.

What you will do

• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to implement frontier AI research ideas.
• Develop systems, tools, and techniques that improve model inference performance.
• Build debugging tools for performance bottlenecks, numerical instabilities, and distributed-systems issues.
• Establish tools and processes that improve collective engineering productivity.
• Remove technical roadblocks and deliver improvements to users quickly and iteratively.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of software engineering experience.
• Experience building large-scale distributed systems.
• Knowledge of modern generative AI architectures and inference optimization.
• Familiarity with open-source inference frameworks such as vLLM and SGLang.
• Experience or ability to quickly gain familiarity with Python, PyTorch, NVIDIA GPU kernel programming, InfiniBand, and NVLink.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, inference, or generative AI.
• Experience optimizing large-scale systems for performance and efficiency.

Culture & Benefits

• Work closely with researchers in a vertically integrated AI infrastructure organization.
• Collaborate across kernels, inference algorithms, model architecture, ASIC co-design, distributed systems, and profiling tools.
• Culture emphasizes growth mindset, respect, integrity, accountability, inclusion, and supportive teamwork.
• Benefits and additional compensation may be available depending on the role and location.