Sr Principal Researcher - Generative AI / Sr Principal Researcheress - Generative AI

Join Microsoft Research AI Frontiers Lab as Principal Researcher – Generative AI

The AI Frontiers lab at Microsoft Research (MSR) is seeking a talented individual for the position of Principal Researcher – Generative AI to join our dynamic team in Zurich, Switzerland.

Our mission is to broaden the Pareto frontier of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, efficiency, and safety through groundbreaking innovations in foundation models and learning agent platforms. Key projects include advancements in Small Language Models, such as Phi and Orca, as well as agentic AI systems, including AutoGen, MagenticOne, and OmniParser.

As a Senior Principal Researcher – Generative AI, you will lead initiatives aimed at advancing Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) technologies. You will play a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of Generative AI models, significantly impacting the development of cutting-edge technologies that provide practical solutions to real-world challenges.

Research Areas

Our ongoing research encompasses, but is not limited to, the following areas:

• Reasoning and inference-time compute strategies
• Action models for automating web and computer tasks
• Evaluation and understanding of model and agent capabilities

MSR fosters a vibrant environment for cutting-edge, multidisciplinary research. Team members enjoy access to diverse real-world problems and data, opportunities for experimentation with significant impact, an open publication policy, and close collaborations with prestigious academic institutions worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Conduct innovative research in collaboration with fellow researchers, engineers, and product groups.
• Be part of a world-class research organization and contribute to breakthroughs in the field, with the opportunity to transform your ideas into impactful products and services used globally.

Qualifications

• Doctorate in Computer Science or a related field AND several years of relevant research experience, or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated research program through public artifacts, such as models, tools, code in the AI space, or publications at prestigious conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, CVPR, COLT, ECCV, ICCV, EMNLP.
• Experience in building and evaluating frontier models.
• Proven track record of publishing academic papers as lead author or essential contributor in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
• Involvement in top conferences relevant to your research domain.
• Demonstrable ability to define an ambitious and original research agenda.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, along with the ability to technically lead a multi-disciplinary team.
• A strong interest in real-world applications and their impact.

Interested candidates are invited to apply online using the form below. Please note that only applications matching the job profile will be considered.