Job description

Overview Microsoft’s Discovery and Quantum (MDQ) division develops and delivers advanced artificial intelligence (AI), cloud-enabled capabilities, and strategic technologies to help solve the world’s major challenges. From accelerating scientific discovery with advanced AI tools, to pioneering breakthroughs in quantum computing, to advancing robotics and AI capabilities that drive real-world impact, joining MDQ means building the future, partnering with fast-moving innovators, and operating in a high-impact, mission-driven environment. At Microsoft Robotics within MDQ, we build and deploy technologies that enable people, robots, and AI agents to collaborate and achieve more. We are building Microsoft’s platform for physical intelligence—an integrated robotics software and AI platform that brings together humans, robots, and agents through robotics AI models, innovative teaming solutions and experiences, physically grounded agentic AI workflows, trustworthy test and evaluation, and real-world customer-focused validation. Built on Microsoft’s core platforms and delivered through and with a global ecosystem of partners and customers, this platform accelerates AI for the physical world and helps robotics solutions move from experimentation to reliable, scaled deployment. We are hiring a Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics at the Principal level to set the technical direction for the systems every other engineer, partner, and customer builds on. This is a cross-cutting systems-focused leadership role, not limited to narrowly scoped projects. You will own the hardest problems in the stack and raise the bar for how the team builds and delivers. Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond. Responsibilities • Own the multi-year technical architecture for the Microsoft Robotics platform, setting the direction the broader engineering organization, partners, and customers build on, and holding that architecture coherent as it scales across teams and deployments. • Make the foundational design decisions that determine how robotics software, AI models, and cloud and edge components fit together, defining the core interfaces and engineering contracts other teams depend on. • Architect systems that meet demanding real-world constraints, balancing latency, throughput, compute efficiency, reliability, and cost across cloud and on-robot edge environments. • Lead the evaluation and validation strategy that gates what ships, establishing the benchmarks, test approach, and quality bar for autonomy, safety, and task performance across simulation, lab, and field, including safe-autonomy boundaries and human-in-the-loop fallback. • Drive the hardest cross-stack technical problems personally, taking on the integration failure modes that emerge where AI models meet production robots, and resolving them through rigorous root-cause analysis of system behavior and field data. • Connect classical robotics engineering with modern AI, partnering across foundation-model, perception, manipulation, locomotion, and simulation teams to bring learned capabilities into a common, production-grade platform rather than one-off integrations. • Establish the engineering bar for the team, owning design standards and review practices, leading the consequential technical reviews, and lifting the quality, testability, and operability of the systems that matter most. • Influence direction across MDQ, Microsoft Research, Azure, hardware and silicon partners, and customers without relying on formal authority, building technical consensus and aligning many teams on a single coherent platform strategy, including representing the platform in the open-source and standards community. • Multiply the team's output through technical leadership, mentoring senior and principal engineers and raising the technical ceiling of the organization rather than only its headcount. • Track the state of the art across embodied AI, robot learning, robotics middleware, and simulation, and decide deliberately how and when new techniques are incorporated into the platform. • Other: • Embody our Culture and Values Qualifications Required Qualifications: • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python • OR equivalent experience. Other Requirements: • Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements is required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: • Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. Preferred Qualifications: • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python • OR equivalent experience. • Demonstrated ownership of a major platform, framework, runtime, or large-scale distributed system used in production by other engineering teams, with accountability for its architecture, reliability, and long-term evolution. • Experience with robot learning at scale, including vision-language-action policies, foundation models for robotics, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or embodied artificial intelligence. • Experience deploying and operating robots in the real world at fleet scale, including fleet orchestration, over-the-air update systems, observability, and edge runtime on compute-constrained and intermittently connected hardware. • Deep systems-level understanding of how perception, learning, planning, control, simulation, and fleet operations interact in deployed autonomous systems, including the failure modes, latency budgets, and trade-offs that emerge at integration boundaries. • Demonstrated ability to lead cross-disciplinary technical efforts spanning robotics hardware, perception, learning, planning, simulation, platform infrastructure, field testing, and artificial intelligence and machine learning teams, and to drive consensus across organizational boundaries. • Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow senior and principal engineers and to raise the technical bar of an organization through architecture, review, and direction rather than increasing team size. • Experience designing and operating machine learning infrastructure and model serving at scale, including inference optimization, low-latency serving, and the versioning, evaluation, and rollback workflows that production models require. • Experience with robotics middleware and autonomy tooling such as Robot Operating System (ROS), Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2), Navigation 2 (Nav2), MoveIt, Robot Visualization (RViz), or Foxglove, and the architectural judgment to know where such frameworks fit in a production platform and where they do not. • Experience with large-scale simulation and sim-to-real transfer using Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Drake, Gazebo, or equivalent, including domain randomization, synthetic data generation, and scenario-based validation. • Experience with cloud platform engineering, Microsoft Azure preferred, including low-latency edge-to-cloud architectures, high-throughput data pipelines, and graphics processing unit-backed training and inference at scale. • Experience with safety-critical or human-in-the-loop autonomy, including evaluation and governance gates and the trust and security controls that regulated and enterprise customers require. • Proficiency in C++ and Python, with a track record of building performant, testable, production-quality robotics or systems software, and the judgment to set engineering standards others follow. • Published research, open-source platform leadership, patents, standards contributions, or comparable external technical leadership in robotics, autonomous systems, embodied artificial intelligence, machine learning infrastructure, or physical artificial intelligence platforms is a strong plus. #MicrosoftRobotics #MDQ Software Engineering IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $220,800 - $331,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: careers.microsoft.com This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled. Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.

Requirements

Must-haves

At Microsoft Robotics within MDQ, we build and deploy technologies that enable people, robots, and AI agents to collaborate and achieve more.
Make the foundational design decisions that determine how robotics software, AI models, and cloud and edge components fit together, defining the core interfaces and engineering contracts other teams depend on.
Architect systems that meet demanding real-world constraints, balancing latency, throughput, compute efficiency, reliability, and cost across cloud and on-robot edge environments.
Multiply the team's output through technical leadership, mentoring senior and principal engineers and raising the technical ceiling of the organization rather than only its headcount.
Track the state of the art across embodied AI, robot learning, robotics middleware, and simulation, and decide deliberately how and when new techniques are incorporated into the platform.
Embody our Culture and Values
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Nice-to-haves

OR equivalent experience.
Experience with robot learning at scale, including vision-language-action policies, foundation models for robotics, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or embodied artificial intelligence.
Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow senior and principal engineers and to raise the technical bar of an organization through architecture, review, and direction rather than increasing team size.
Experience with large-scale simulation and sim-to-real transfer using Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Drake, Gazebo, or equivalent, including domain randomization, synthetic data generation, and scenario-based validation.
Experience with safety-critical or human-in-the-loop autonomy, including evaluation and governance gates and the trust and security controls that regulated and enterprise customers require.
Proficiency in C++ and Python, with a track record of building performant, testable, production-quality robotics or systems software, and the judgment to set engineering standards others follow.
#MicrosoftRobotics #MDQ
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

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