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Job Details
Posted date: Jan 22, 2026
There have been 3 jobs posted with the title of Principal Research Software Development Engineer all time at Microsoft.Category: Software Engineering
Location: Redmond, WA
Estimated salary: $222,050
Range: $139,900 - $304,200
Employment type: Full-Time
Work location type: 3 days / week in-office
Role: Individual Contributor
Description
OverviewResearch Software Development Engineer – Microsoft Research Catalyst Lab
Join a team working at the center of frontier AI. You’ll collaborate directly with researchers in one of the world’s premier research labs, transforming breakthrough ideas into real, reliable, scalable capabilities used across Microsoft products. This role sits at the high‑impact intersection of research ↔ engineering ↔ product, where the work you do directly shapes what AI becomes next.
Focus Areas You May Work On
Agentic Memory
Efficiency
The physical world
Security
Frontier model architectures
Mathematics and logic applied to LLMs
What We’re Looking For
You might be a great fit if you:
Love the zone where research meets engineering — the space where new ideas become real systems.
Feel energized by messy, open-ended problems where exploration and clarity are equally important.
Can turn a paper into a prototype — and a prototype into a product.
Care about performance, safety, correctness, and experience, not just cleverness.
Communicate clearly, collaborate naturally, and debug anything with calm and rigor.
Want to build systems that meaningfully advance what AI can do, not just iterate on what already exists.
Bring your drive, rigor, curiosity, and the ambition to create something extraordinary.
How we work
We operate with urgency and ambition:
Short iteration cycles: hypothesis → prototype → evaluate → refine → ship
Deep collaboration with researchers inventing new capabilities
High ownership of systems, experiments, and outcomes
Evidence-driven decisions informed by evals, metrics, and safety signals
A builder’s mindset: clarity, craft, and care for the details that make systems robust
You’ll join a team driven by curiosity, accountability, and the conviction that we are building something that truly moves the field forward, tackling problems that don’t even have names yet alongside people defining the state of the art.
If this excites you, we want to meet you
Bring your curiosity. Bring your craft. Bring your appetite for building the future.
And come work with people who are redefining what’s possible in AI; in the place where tomorrow’s breakthroughs are being born.
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.
In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.
#Research
Responsibilities
Translate research into systems: take early concepts and turn them into robust prototypes and product-ready components.
Design high velocity experimentation loops: datasets, evals, benchmarks, agent flows, safety tests, and decision frameworks.
Scale and optimize: training, inference, efficiency, latency, cost, reliability.
Partner cross functionally: coinvent with researchers, codesign with product teams, and land features that matter.
As a Research Software Development Engineer in Microsoft Research, you will design, develop, execute, and implement technology research projects in collaboration with other team members, research partners, and product groups. 
Work with the team to identify, evaluate, and deploy new AI tools and technologies to accelerate our progress.
As a member of a world class research organization, you will be a part of research breakthroughs and play a crucial role in driving innovation from the lab to product.
Embody our culture and values.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:  
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications:
A successful candidate needn’t have all, or any, of these qualifications:
Ability to competently operate across an entire modern AI-centric software stack. Adaptability to dive into a new domain quickly. Polyglot technology curiosity. Be a voracious learner of new languages, paradigms, tools, and techniques, consuming publications.
Building agentic systems that operate at cloud scale using common agent protocols and coding frameworks.
Systematic use of benchmarking and other data-driven techniques to guide design and development.
Ability to thrive in the face of ambiguity, able to prototype starting with a research concept or paper rather than a spec. Be a thought partner and operate as part of a multidisciplinary team as we build prototypes quickly, fail fast, pivot, and adapt.
Experience with data science, machine learning (ML), Large Language Models (LLMs), Natural Language Processing (NLP), computer vision, multimodal input and processing, software security.
Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This 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.
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