Sr Principal Researcher

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Microsoft Research (MSR) AI Frontiers lab is seeking applications for the position of Principal Researcher– Generative AI to join their team in Zurich, Switzerland.

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. Some of our projects include work on Small Language Models (e.g. Phi, Orca) and agentic AI systems (e.g. AutoGen, MagenticOne, OmniParser).

We are seeking a Sr. Principal Researcher – Generative AI to join our team and lead efforts on the advancement of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) technologies. As a Sr. Principal Researcher – Generative AI, you will play a crucial role in leading, developing, improving, and exploring the capabilities of Generative AI models. Your work will have a significant impact on the development of cutting-edge technologies, advancing state-of-the-art and providing practical solutions to real-world problems.

Our ongoing research areas encompass but are 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 offers a vibrant environment for cutting-edge, multidisciplinary, research, including access to diverse, real-world problems and data, opportunities for experimentation and real-world impact, an open publication policy, and close links to top academic institutions around the world.

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Doctorate in Computer Science or relevant field AND several years related research experience OR equivalent experience.
• Research program demonstrated by public artifacts like models, tools, code in AI space or publications at the following conferences: NeurIPS, ICML,ICLR, ACL, NAACL, CVPR, COLT,ECCV,ICCV,EMNLP

Additional or Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with building and evaluating frontier models
• Experience publishing academic papers as a lead author or essential contributor in the field of Artificial Intelligence
• Experience participating in a top conference in relevant research domain.
• Demonstrable ability to define an ambitious, original research agenda
• Ability to collaborate, communicate effectively, and technically lead multi-disciplinary team.
• Keen interest in real-world applications and impact.

• As a Sr. Principal Researcher in MSR, you will perform cutting-edge research in collaboration with other researchers, engineers, and product groups.
• As a member of a word-class research organization, you will be a part of research breakthroughs in the field and will be given an opportunity to realize your ideas in products and services used worldwide.