Software Engineer (VS Code team)

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Visual Studio Code is looking for a research engineer. You will mostly be focused on the prompt and model side of our AI features, and you should feel equally comfortable coding relevant product features. You will be working with incredibly knowledgeable and motivated peers in a fast-paced and supportive environment.

Visual Studio Code is a lightweight, cross-platform AI code editor used by millions of developers across the globe. Details are at https://code.visualstudio.com, our code is at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. The VS Code team develops the VS Code product as well as significant extensions such as the Python, Remote-SSH, Dev Containers, and WSL.

Required Basic Qualifications:

• MS in CS, Applied Math or a comparable degree and field
• 3+ years of experience as an IC
• Excellent Python coding skills
• Demonstrated excellence in fine-tuning models that have been used in production
• Demonstrated excellence in prompt authoring and refinement
• Deep understanding of performance optimization of LLM calls
• Deep understanding of data pipelines

More about you:

• You have a passion for great developer tools and enjoy working with developers.
• You are an avid learner and self-starter, and you like to be challenged.
• You possess a can-do attitude and a strong desire to innovate.

More and more of our features are powered by models. These can be vanilla models like Claude Sonnet 3.7, GPT 4.1, or fine-tuned versions of o4-mini or fitting open-weight models. Your work will include:

• Improve prompts to lower TTFT as well as increase the quality of the responses
• Analyze the product and identify opportunities for custom model usage
• Create datasets for model fine-tuning
• Improve our engineering processes and tools around data collection, data cleaning, and fine-tuning
• Interact with our users on GitHub and on social channels
• Drive community engagement through blog posts and conference and meetup presentations

Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.