Pretraining Data (AI)

Location: Zurich, Switzerland

Base pay: CHF 146,200–245,900 per year for Software Engineering IC4; CHF 183,800–275,800 per year for Software Engineering IC5.

Company

Microsoft AI develops frontier AI models and products, with this role supporting foundation model pretraining and deployment.

What you will do

• Design and curate high-quality datasets for training and evaluation, and run data ablation experiments to assess their impact.
• Develop and maintain scalable pipelines for data ingestion, processing, filtering, and annotation.
• Analyze real-world datasets for quality, diversity, and relevance, identifying areas for improvement.
• 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, including coding in Python and common data libraries such as Pandas and NumPy, or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant technical discipline and 10+ years of technical engineering experience with Python and common data libraries, or a relevant master’s degree and 8+ years of experience, or equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of experience in data analysis or data engineering with large-scale unstructured or semi-structured datasets.
• Proficiency in statistics and exploratory data analysis methods.
• Familiarity with Spark, Ray, or Apache Beam.
• Ability to communicate technical findings clearly to research and product teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Cross-disciplinary collaboration with scientists, engineers, and annotators.
• Work focused on research and engineering that improves shipped AI models and products.
• Academic publishing is not a priority for this role.
• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
• Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations during the application process.