Principal AI Architect

Microsoft

Confirmed live today High trust
Hybrid

Quick summary

Work type
Hybrid
Location
—
Salary
$142,800–$274,800 / yr
Posted
3 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live today
Closes
Apr 5, 2027

Market check

Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $228k
This role $209k
$126k $301k
below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays less than 57% of similar roles. Most pay $184,900–$270,844 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $209k versus about $228k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a global technology leader producing software, hardware, and cloud services including Windows, Office 365, Azure cloud platform, Xbox gaming, and Surface devices. Industry: Software & Cloud Computing

Microsoft currently has 648 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $119,800–$234,700 across 624 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Principal AI Architect

The Principal AI Architect - M365 IC3 Team (Intelligent Conversation and Communications Cloud) defines the technical vision and architecture for AI, LLM, RAG, and agent evaluation systems. You will design evaluation frameworks to assess product quality throughout the lifecycle, identifying behavioral gaps, model limitations, and retrieval issues before they impact customers. Responsibilities include building systems that connect product telemetry, human judgment, and automated evals into build pipelines and release gates. You will use skills in statistics, predictive analytics, and research to translate ambiguous goals into measurable success criteria. Key technologies include LLMs, agentic systems, RAG, ML pipelines, and enterprise search. You will partner with engineering and data science teams to integrate rigorous evaluation methods into product codebases for products like Copilot, ensuring responsible AI practices.

What you'll do

  • Define the technical vision and architecture for AI, LLM, RAG, and agent evaluation systems across the product lifecycle.
  • Design evaluation frameworks to assess product quality during development, at launch, and post-ship.
  • Identify behavioral gaps, failure modes, and model limitations before they become customer-impacting issues.
  • Integrate evaluation methods into build pipelines, release gates, and engineering workflows as a standard practice.
  • Build systems that connect product telemetry, offline evaluation, human judgment, and automated quality signals.
  • Translate ambiguous product goals into measurable evaluation strategies, success criteria, and technical plans.
  • Drive architecture decisions for data pipelines, model interfaces, search systems, and reporting dashboards.
  • Mentor senior engineers and applied scientists on building reliable and scalable evaluation infrastructure.

What we're looking for

  • Bachelor's Degree in a relevant field and 6+ years experience, Master's and 4+ years, or Doctorate and 3+ years of related experience.
  • Master's Degree in a relevant field and 9+ years experience, or Doctorate and 6+ years of related experience.
  • 5+ years experience creating publications such as patents, libraries, or peer-reviewed academic papers.
  • 5+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program in academic or industry settings.
  • 2+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events as an invited speaker.
  • 3+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems or products from ideation to shipping.
  • Demonstrated experience evaluating LLMs, including designing eval datasets, defining quality metrics, and analyzing model behavior.
  • Experience building evaluation platforms, experimentation systems, model observability, or agent evaluation infrastructure.

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