Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics

• 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 teams 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 ourCultureandValues

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelors 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:

• Masters 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 Bachelors 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 $165600 - $296400 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 $220800 - $331200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
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.

Required Experience:

IC