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 Principal level to design and build core infrastructure components of the Microsoft Robotics platform, including the Software Development Kits (SDKs), cloud services, edge runtimes, developer tooling, and agent orchestration layers that enable people, AI agents, and robots to operate together across end-to-end mission workflows. This is an engineering role where you will make foundational architectural decisions that shape how the entire platform scales, how partners integrate, and how autonomy capabilities are composed and deployed.

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

• Architect and implement core platform components, including robotics SDKs, cloud-hosted Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), edge runtimes, and agent orchestration frameworks that enable developers and partners to compose interoperable autonomy capabilities (perception, planning, control, multi-agent coordination) into deployable mission workflows.
• Design the platform's extensibility and integration architecture, defining how first-party autonomy capabilities, first- and third-party models, partner hardware systems, and customer-specific logic are composed, versioned, tested, and deployed across cloud and edge environments.
• Build production-grade data infrastructure spanning the full robotics lifecycle including instrumentation libraries, data acquisition services, human-in-the-loop workflows, dataset versioning and curation pipelines, and data quality governance supporting both real-world and synthetic/simulated data at scale.
• Own cross-cutting platform concerns including authentication and authorization across cloud-edge boundaries, API versioning and backward compatibility, multi-tenant isolation, and performance at the latencies required by real-time robotic control loops.
• Drive the developer experience for the Microsoft Robotics platform, to include defining the Command Line Interface (CLI), SDK patterns, documentation strategy, sample code, and inner-loop development workflow that make it fast and reliable for internal teams and external partners to build on the platform.
• Collaborate with autonomy, simulation, and evaluation teams to ensure that platform primitives (compute orchestration, data routing, model serving, experiment tracking) meet the performance, reliability, and reproducibility requirements of Machine Learning (ML) training, sim-to-real transfer, and online evaluation workloads.
• Lead technical design reviews, write architecture decision records, and establish engineering practices for the platform team, mentoring senior engineers and raising the bar for code quality, testing, and operational readiness across the organization.

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.

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 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 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of experience designing and building developer platforms, SDKs, APIs, or distributed infrastructure used by multiple teams or external partners, with demonstrable ownership of cross-team technical decisions and architecture.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native systems engineering - including microservice architecture, containerized workloads (Kubernetes), service mesh, API gateway patterns, and CI/CD at scale - preferably on Azure.
• Proficiency in C++, Rust, or Go for systems-level components AND Python for tooling, data pipelines, and ML integration, with high standards for code quality, testing, and performance.
• Demonstrated ability to make and communicate architectural trade-offs across competing concerns (latency vs. throughput, flexibility vs. safety, developer velocity vs. operational complexity), with a track record of decisions that held up at scale.
• Experience with robotics middleware (Robot Operating System (ROS)/ROS2), real-time systems, or edge computing platforms, including the unique constraints of deploying software to physically embodied systems with strict latency and safety requirements.
• Familiarity with ML infrastructure including model serving (Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), TensorRT, Triton), training orchestration, experiment tracking, or feature stores, particularly in the context of deploying learned models to edge devices.
• Experience building simulation infrastructure, digital twin platforms, or CI-based testing pipelines that incorporate physics-based simulation for validation and regression testing.
• Prior work designing multi-tenant platforms with partner-facing APIs, including developer portal experiences, API versioning strategies, and backward-compatibility guarantees.
• Understanding of agentic AI architectures, including agent orchestration, tool use, multi-agent coordination, and human-in-the-loop workflows, and how they apply to physical systems.
• Contributions to open-source robotics, cloud, or developer tooling projects, or published work on platform architecture, robotics systems, or distributed systems.

Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800.00 - $274,800.00 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 $188,000.00 - $304,200.00 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.