Director, AI Data Acquisition and Operations - Pretraining (AI)

Location: Mountain View, California, United States

Salary: USD $165,600–$272,300 gross annual base pay for the San Francisco Bay Area; the general U.S. range is USD $130,900–$251,900.

Company

Microsoft AI develops frontier AI models across text, reasoning, and multimodal capabilities.

What you will do

• Partner with AI researchers to identify the data types and characteristics that can improve model performance.
• Research global data markets and identify differentiated, hard-to-access training data sources.
• Develop acquisition strategies through licensing, partnerships, acquisitions, data creation, and other commercial structures.
• Evaluate datasets and partners by research value, uniqueness, scale, quality, rights, provenance, and usability for AI training.
• Lead negotiations with data owners and coordinate cross-functional initiatives across Research, Business Development, Procurement, Legal, Privacy, Finance, and Engineering.
• Navigate copyright, licensing, privacy, data rights, and responsible AI questions with Legal, Privacy, Compliance, and policy partners.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree and 8+ years of experience in strategy, business development, data acquisition, technology, research partnerships, content licensing, or related fields, or equivalent experience.
• Experience working with technical or research teams to translate ambiguous requirements into actionable strategies or partnerships.
• Ability to research complex markets, identify unconventional opportunities, and create strategies where established playbooks do not exist.
• Experience negotiating complex commercial agreements or partnerships.
• Experience operating in fast-moving environments with shifting priorities and underspecified requirements.
• Strong judgment across technical, commercial, legal, and strategic considerations.
• Experience building and leading a team.

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s degree and 10+ years of experience in data strategy, business development, content or data licensing, technology strategy, research partnerships, or related fields, or equivalent experience.
• Experience with leading AI research organizations, technology companies, data providers, publishers, platforms, or major content owners.
• Strong understanding of the AI data ecosystem, including pretraining, post-training, multimodal, and specialized data.
• Fluency in data rights, copyright, licensing, provenance, and privacy, including experience with novel or precedent-setting questions.

Culture & Benefits

• Work at the center of an AI superintelligence lab focused on advancing frontier models responsibly.
• Collaboration across research, commercial, legal, privacy, policy, finance, procurement, and engineering functions.
• Benefits and other compensation may be available for eligible roles.
• The position remains open for at least five days, with applications accepted until filled.
• Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations during the application process.