Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics

** 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…