Researcher - Pretraining Data (AI)

Location: Mountain View, California; New York City, New York; or Redmond, Washington, United States

Salary: USD $119,800–$234,700 per year for IC4 roles, with location-specific ranges of USD $160,200–$261,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City; USD $142,800–$274,800 per year for IC5 roles, with location-specific ranges of USD $188,000–$304,200.

Company

Microsoft AI develops frontier artificial intelligence models and products at scale.

What you will do

• Create high-quality datasets for AI model training and evaluation.
• Run data ablation experiments to measure dataset impact and identify effective training data.
• Develop and maintain scalable pipelines for data ingestion, processing, filtering, and annotation.
• Analyze large real-world datasets for quality, diversity, relevance, and improvement opportunities.
• Build tools for dataset auditing, visualization, and versioning.
• Collaborate with Safety, Ethics, and Governance teams on privacy, quality, and responsible AI standards.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in AI, Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Physics, Engineering, or a related technical field, plus 4+ years of technical engineering experience, or equivalent experience.
• Programming experience in Python and common data libraries such as Pandas and NumPy.
• Experience analyzing or engineering large-scale unstructured or semi-structured datasets.
• Proficiency in statistics and exploratory data analysis.
• Ability to communicate technical findings clearly to research and product teams.

Nice to have

• 10+ years of technical engineering experience, or a master’s degree with 8+ years of experience.
• Familiarity with Spark, Ray, or Apache Beam.

Culture & Benefits

• Cross-disciplinary collaboration with scientists, engineers, annotators, and governance specialists.
• Work focused on research and engineering improvements for shipped AI models and products.
• Benefits and additional compensation may be available depending on the role and location.
• Equal employment opportunity and reasonable accommodation support are provided.