Senior Systems Research Engineer - Research Engineering - MSR Cambridge

We are seeking a Systems Research Engineer to accelerate our Future AI Infrastructure research area. You will bring key skills and experience in operating systems, performance, distributed systems, CPUs, GPUs, and machine learning. Good systems research happens when you build things to uncover hidden assumptions – your implementation skills are at the heart of this. You will collaborate closely with researchers to identify, design and implement proof of concept solutions to some of the hardest future problems of AI infrastructure. You will partner with product teams to help land our research in a meaningful way, accelerating delivery of our lab’s research into shipping products used by millions of people world-wide. This role is within the Research Engineering team at MSR Cambridge. Our team has broad experience spanning front-end, systems, networking and ML engineering at datacentre scale. We work across all the research areas in MSR Cambridge, deeply embedded in research projects.

Responsibilities

• Combine strengths in computer systems research, and software engineering competence to contribute to the design and prioritisation of research activities.
• Build prototypes of future AI systems to demonstrate research value, in some cases bringing these prototypes all the way to product-level readiness.
• Evaluate research prototypes and help write up results to communicate outcomes clearly.
• Collaborate with researchers and product teams, helping with smooth technology transfer between them.
• Reinforce a positive environment by applying best practices and high-quality engineering standards.
• Gain deep expertise in one (or more) subareas of research, and general understanding of a broad area.
• Understand the relevant literature and applicable research techniques.
• Contribute to academic publication of research outcomes.
• Proactively ensure high standards of software security over research prototypes and library supply chains.
• Understand and follow ethics and privacy policies relating to research processes and data handling, as appropriate.

Qualifications

• Masters degree in Computer Science or related area, or equivalent training and experience in research.
• Proficient in collaborative software development in Python and lower-level languages.
• Experience with one or more of operating systems, performance analysis, distributed systems, CPU and GPU architecture, or machine learning systems.
• Experience of low-level systems and/or performance tuning trade-offs.
• Excellent communication skills in English, both written and spoken, including the skill to communicate technical results and justify assumptions to diverse technical audiences.
• Willingness and flexibility to operate in a highly agile and dynamic environment.
• Demonstrated ability to work within large codebases.

Preferred

• Doctorate (PhD) in Computer Science or related area, or equivalent training and experience in research.
• Experience of cluster-based distributed data processing techniques.
• Experience with the internals of machine learning systems.
• Demonstrated experience working within a multi-disciplinary team.

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.