below marketmost similar roles pay hereabove market
This role pays more than
57%
of similar roles. Most pay
$180,281–$245,687
— the blue band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$209k
versus about
$213k
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
694 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$119,800–$234,700
across 651 roles with salary data.
JOB TITLE: Principal Research Engineer
The Principal Research Engineer joins Microsoft Research Americas to advance how foundation models are trained, adapted, evaluated, and improved. Working with researchers and engineers, you will lead hands-on work across model pretraining, continued pretraining, fine-tuning, and post-training to turn promising ideas into reproducible experiments. You will improve model quality by modifying architectures, learning objectives, optimizers, and hyperparameters while designing ablation studies for accuracy, reasoning, and safety. You will diagnose training instabilities, numerical issues, and data-quality defects. The role requires proficiency in Python, C, C++, C#, or Java, along with experience in PyTorch or JAX. You will also utilize distributed model training, mixed precision, and GPU performance optimization to scale successful approaches across GPU clusters for large-scale foundation model development.
Lead model-training programs including pretraining, continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and post-training.
Improve model quality by modifying architectures, training data, learning objectives, optimizers, and hyperparameters.
Design and implement controlled experiments, ablation studies, and evaluation methods for accuracy and safety.
Diagnose and resolve training instabilities, convergence failures, numerical issues, and data-quality defects.
Develop reusable training, evaluation, and experimentation practices to support multiple research initiatives.
Partner with infrastructure specialists to scale successful approaches across GPU clusters and improve training efficiency.
Provide technical direction to research and engineering teams and translate ambiguous goals into measurable milestones.
What we're looking for
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field and 6+ years of technical engineering experience.
Proficiency in coding in languages including Python, C, C++, C#, or Java.
Master's Degree or Doctorate in a related technical field and 8+ years of technical engineering experience (preferred).
Bachelor's Degree in a related technical field and 12+ years of technical engineering experience (preferred).
Experience training language or foundation models through pretraining or continued training of existing base models (preferred).
Experience improving model quality through changes to training data, architecture, learning objectives, optimization methods, or post-training techniques (preferred).
Experience developing and debugging machine learning systems using Python and frameworks like PyTorch or JAX (preferred).
Experience with distributed model training, mixed precision, GPU performance, or multi-node training (preferred).
C/C++
MATLAB
Python
FPGA
MIMO
OFDM
Signal Processing
RF Design
Wireless Communications
Mesh Networking
Channel Modeling
Digital Communication
Radio Frequency Sensing
Prototyping
Simulation