Pretraining Data (AI)

Location: London, United Kingdom

Salary: £74,700–£122,600 per year for Software Engineering IC4; £93,500–£161,800 per year for Software Engineering IC5.

Company

Microsoft AI develops frontier AI models and products, with this role supporting pre-training initiatives across Microsoft AI.

What you will do

• Design and curate high-quality datasets for training and evaluation of frontier AI models.
• Run experiments and data ablations to assess dataset impact and identify effective data sources.
• Develop and maintain scalable pipelines for data ingestion, processing, filtering, and annotation.
• Analyze real-world datasets for quality, diversity, relevance, and improvement opportunities.
• Build lightweight tools and workflows for dataset auditing, visualization, and versioning.
• Collaborate with Safety, Ethics, and Governance teams on quality, privacy, and responsible AI standards.

Requirements

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

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant technical discipline and 10+ years of technical engineering experience, or a master’s degree in a relevant technical discipline and 8+ years of technical engineering experience, or equivalent experience.
• Familiarity with data processing frameworks such as Spark, Ray, or Apache Beam.

Culture & Benefits

• Cross-disciplinary collaboration with scientists, engineers, and annotators.
• Work focused on research and engineering that improves shipped AI models and products.
• Collaboration with Safety, Ethics, and Governance teams to support privacy and responsible AI practices.
• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
• Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer.

Hiring process

• Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
• The position will be open for a minimum of five days.