Member of Technical Staff – Reinforcement Learning Systems (AI)

Location: United States — Mountain View, New York City, or Redmond. Employees living within 50 miles of a U.S. office are expected to work from that office at least four days per week.

Base pay: USD $142,800–$274,800 per year across the U.S. Different ranges apply to the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City metropolitan area, and IC6 level.

Company

Microsoft AI is a startup-like organization within Microsoft focused on advancing Copilot, consumer AI products, generative AI research, and responsible artificial intelligence.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and own core reinforcement learning infrastructure supporting research at scale.
• Build systems across orchestration, environments, training, inference, and evaluation.
• Investigate reinforcement learning behavior and collaborate with research teams to improve performance and stability.
• Translate research ideas into practical algorithms, training recipes, and scalable implementations.
• Profile and optimize training and evaluation pipelines to improve throughput and reduce computational overhead.
• Develop APIs, abstractions, automated tests, documentation, and technical analyses that support researcher productivity.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field plus 6+ years of technical engineering experience, or equivalent experience.
• Strong programming and software engineering skills in languages including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• Experience with large-scale systems, parallel or concurrent programming, distributed systems, and system design.
• Ability to build complex systems from scratch, diagnose cross-system issues, and optimize performance.
• Strong collaboration, communication, attention to detail, and ability to manage shifting priorities.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree plus 8+ years of experience, or bachelor’s degree plus 12+ years of experience.
• Machine learning or generative AI experience.
• Experience leading technical projects and supporting architectural decisions with data.
• Background in mathematics, competitive programming, or related fields.

Culture & Benefits

• Research-oriented environment connecting advanced research with production systems.
• Collaborative work with research and product teams across Microsoft AI.
• Culture centered on growth mindset, respect, integrity, accountability, inclusion, safety, and responsible AI.
• Potential eligibility for benefits and additional compensation.