Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics (Software Systems)

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 (Software Systems) at the Senior level, to own the reliability, observability, and operational health of our production robotics platform — spanning Azure-hosted cloud services, on-robot edge runtimes, and the data and telemetry systems that connect them. This is an individual contributor role with deep hands-on ownership: you will be the engineer who builds and operates the production infrastructure that keeps physical AI systems running safely and reliably at scale. This role sits at the intersection of site reliability engineering (SRE) and robotics systems engineering; you will ensure that the software powering real-world robots in partner and customer environments is safe, performant, monitorable, and recoverable.

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.

#MicrosoftRobotics #MDQ

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate the observability and monitoring infrastructure for the Microsoft Robotics platform, including telemetry pipelines, distributed tracing, alerting, dashboards, and health models that span cloud services on Azure and edge/on-robot components running in partner environments.

• Instantiate the core incident response and reliability capabilities for production robotics workloads, to include defining Service Level Indicators (SLIs)/Service Level Objectives (SLOs), building automated detection and remediation, conducting post-incident reviews, and driving systemic improvements that prevent recurrence across the fleet.

• Engineer production-grade deployment and release pipelines for robotics software, including safe rollout strategies for edge/on-robot updates, canary deployments, rollback automation, and stage-gated release processes that enforce safety and quality checks before software reaches physical systems.

• Build and maintain the secure-by-design infrastructure for cloud-to-edge communication, including certificate management, secure boot chains, encrypted telemetry channels, and access controls for remotely managed robotic systems.

• Partner with platform, autonomy, and simulation engineers to instrument new capabilities with production-quality logging, metrics, and tracing from day one, embedding operational readiness into the development lifecycle rather than retrofitting it.

• Develop capacity planning models and performance baselines for robotics workloads, identifying scaling bottlenecks in data ingestion, model inference, simulation execution, and real-time control loops before they impact partner deployments.

• Contribute to eventual on-call rotations and build the runbooks, escalation paths, and operational documentation that enable the broader team to support production systems confidently.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, or Python

• OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are 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:

• Master'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, or Python

• OR 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, or Python

• OR equivalent experience.

• 3+ years technical experience working with large-scale cloud or distributed systems.

• 4+ years of hands-on experience operating and debugging distributed systems in production, including cloud-native services (Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)), containerized workloads (Kubernetes, Docker), and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.

• Experience with edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT), or embedded systems in production - particularly systems where cloud services coordinate with on-device software running on constrained or physically deployed hardware.

• Proficiency in at least one systems-level language (Go, C++, Rust) and one scripting language (Python, Bash), with experience building monitoring, automation, and tooling for production environments.

• Experience defining and operating against Service Level Indicators (SLIs)/Service Level Objectives (SLOs), building alerting and dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Monitor, or equivalent), and leading incident response processes in on-call environments.

• Demonstrated ability to work across the stack - from cloud infrastructure and networking to application-level telemetry and on-device diagnostics - to identify and resolve production issues under time pressure.

• Experience with fleet management at scale - including over-the-air (OTA) update systems, device lifecycle management, and remote diagnostics for distributed hardware deployments.

• Knowledge of security engineering for IoT/edge systems, including secure boot, device attestation, certificate rotation, and encrypted communication channels.

• Experience with Azure-specific services (Azure IoT Hub, Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)) and their application to hybrid cloud-edge architectures.

• Familiarity with robotics systems, Robot Operating System (ROS)/Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2), real-time operating systems, or autonomous vehicle infrastructure, including the unique reliability challenges of software controlling physical actuators.

• Prior work in industries with high-consequence software failures (robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical devices, aerospace) where reliability engineering directly impacts physical safety.

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800.00 - $234,700.00 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 $160,200.00 - $261,000.00 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.