Senior Principal Researcher - Generative AI

Job Opportunity: Principal Researcher – Generative AI

Microsoft Research (MSR) AI Frontiers Lab is inviting talented individuals to join our team in Zurich, Switzerland, as a Principal Researcher specializing in Generative AI.

The mission of the AI Frontiers Lab is to expand the Pareto frontier of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, efficiency, and safety through innovations in foundation models and learning agent platforms. Our projects encompass exciting developments in Small Language Models (e.g., Phi, Orca) and agentic AI systems (e.g., AutoGen, MagenticOne, OmniParser).

In this role, you will be pivotal in advancing Generative AI and Large Language Model (LLM) technologies. As a Senior Principal Researcher, you will lead efforts to enhance and explore the capabilities of Generative AI models. Your contributions will significantly influence the creation of cutting-edge technologies, advance state-of-the-art methods, and deliver practical solutions to real-world challenges.

Research Areas

Our ongoing research focuses on, but is not limited to:

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

MSR provides a vibrant environment for multidisciplinary research, offering access to diverse, real-world problems and data, opportunities for experimentation and impact, an open publication policy, and strong connections to leading academic institutions worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Conduct cutting-edge research in collaboration with fellow researchers, engineers, and product groups.
• Contribute to groundbreaking research initiatives and bring your innovative ideas to products and services utilized globally.

Qualifications

• Doctorate in Computer Science or a relevant field with several years of related research experience, or equivalent expertise.
• A research program evidenced by public artifacts such as models, tools, code in the AI space, or publications at leading conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, CVPR, COLT, ECCV, ICCV, EMNLP.
• Proven experience in building and evaluating frontier models.
• Track record of publishing academic papers as a lead author or essential contributor in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
• Participation in top conferences relevant to the research domain.
• Demonstrated ability to define an ambitious and original research agenda.
• Proficient in collaboration and effective communication, with the ability to technically lead a multidisciplinary team.
• Genuine interest in real-world applications and impacts.

Apply online using the form below. Please note that only applications matching the job profile will be considered.