Senior Researcher

Senior Researcher

United States, Washington, Redmond

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Job description

Company and benefits

Job number

200055955

Date posted

Sep 29, 2026

Work site

0 days / week in-office – remote

Travel

Less than 25%

Profession

Research, Applied, & Data Sciences

Discipline

Research Sciences

Role type

Individual Contributor

Employment type

Full-Time

Overview

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be and take their careers further. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and the sky is the limit thinking in a cloud-enabled world.

Microsoft’s Azure Data engineering team is leading the transformation of analytics in the world of data with products like databases, data integration, big data analytics, messaging & real-time analytics, and business intelligence. The products our portfolio include Microsoft Fabric, Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Power BI. Our mission is to build the data platform for the age of AI, powering a new class of data-first applications and driving a data culture.

The Databases organization delivers trusted, scalable operational AI ready databases that power application development across cloud, hybrid, and on premises environments. Our portfolio includes SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, DocumentDB, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, supporting developers as they build AI native applications and run critical workloads at global scale.

We work on models, agents and indexing infrastructure for semantic retrieval and memories. Among other things, we developed DiskANN (github.com/Microsoft/DiskANN), the vector engine used across Microsoft and broadly in industry. We develop cutting edge models for semantic retrieval quality across modalities, agents for semantic retrieval and memories. We are a small team with a lot of freedom in setting technical direction and drive cross-company projects with large scope and own outcomes.

We do not just value differences or different perspectives. We seek them out and invite them in so we can tap into the collective power of everyone in the company. As a result, our customers are better served.

Responsibilities

• Masters one or more subareas (e.g., Object Recognition, Text Classification) and gains expertise in a broad area of research (e.g., Machine Learning [ML], Natural Language - Processing, Computer Vision, Statistical Modeling). Understands the corresponding literature, applicable research techniques, and academic context.
• Identifies and articulates problems in an area of research that directly or indirectly impact business opportunities.
• Advances a research agenda through one or more research projects, yielding new algorithms, prototypes, theories, tools, methods, analyses, insights, or collections of data in one or more subareas or a broad area of research.
• Expands collaborative relationships with relevant product and business groups inside or outside of Microsoft as a domain expert and provides expertise or technology to them. Takes initiative and participates in activities such as incorporating relevant data security considerations and guidelines, technology transfers, benchmarking technology with public domain data, filing patents, authoring white papers, developing or maintaining tools/services for internal Microsoft use, or consulting for product or business groups.
• Collaborates with other relevant researchers, research groups, or engineering teams to contri