below marketmost similar roles pay hereabove market
This role pays more than
64%
of similar roles. Most pay
$170,000–$245,112
— the blue band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$231k
versus about
$208k
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.
As a Senior Principal Researcher - AI Systems Architecture at Microsoft Research, you will lead research to connect frontier model behavior with runtime, memory, interconnect, and hardware architecture. You will define cross-layer architectures to improve sustained inference throughput, accelerator utilization, and energy efficiency. Your daily work involves first-principles workload analysis, architectural modeling, pre-silicon definition, and prototype evaluation. You will build analytical models, simulators, and experimental systems to validate hypotheses regarding computation, memory access, bandwidth, and power requirements. Key technical competencies include expertise in DRAM, HBM, CXL, GPU memory systems, 2.5D/3D integration, and high-speed scale-up interconnects. You will solve complex problems involving LLM inference, mixture-of-experts routing, and KV-cache behavior by translating new hardware capabilities into measurable system-level improvements across research and product engineering.
Lead end-to-end AI system, memory, and hardware architecture to identify cross-layer opportunities.
Develop architectural abstractions connecting AI model execution behavior with platform capabilities.
Analyze emerging AI workloads regarding computation, memory access, communication, and power requirements.
Drive pre-silicon architectural exploration, performance modeling, and implementation pathfinding for next-generation hardware.
Evaluate trade-offs across performance, bandwidth, latency, power, thermal limits, and total cost of ownership.
Build analytical models, simulators, prototypes, and experimental systems to validate architectural hypotheses.
Transfer promising research concepts toward production deployment and product engineering.
What we're looking for
Doctorate in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or relevant field and 6+ years related research experience.
Master's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or relevant field and 7+ years related research experience.
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field and 9+ years related research experience.
Equivalent experience to the degree and years of experience requirements.
Extensive experience in computer architecture, memory systems, silicon architecture, AI systems, platform design, or hardware/software co-design (preferred).
Experience reasoning across workload behavior, system software, memory hierarchy, interconnects, and hardware architecture (preferred).
Experience with pre-silicon architecture definition, modeling, feasibility analysis, or highly parallel accelerator-based systems (preferred).
Record of technical innovation demonstrated through research, patents, publications, prototypes, architecture delivery, or product deployment (preferred).
AI Model Architectures
Hardware-Software Co-design
GPU
CPU
DLA
CUDA
TensorRT
Triton
TensorRT-LLM
Distributed Training
Quantization
Sparsity
Pruning
Inference Optimization
Transformers
Diffusion Models
Mixture-of-Experts
NVIDIA DRIVE
FP8
FP4
KV-cache Optimization
SoC Architecture
System Architecture
AI Accelerators
Generative AI
machine-learning
C++
Python
DRAM
HBM
LPDDR
DDR
GDDR
Ethernet
InfiniBand
RDMA
Hardware/Software Co-design
ISA Design
Microarchitecture
Performance Modeling
Chiplets
RAS
ECC
3D Integration
System Architecture
Chiplets
3D Stacking
PCIe
SATA
Memory Systems
Heterogeneous Integration
Power Management
High-Speed IO
Remote Device Management
System Monitoring
Technology Strategy
Remote (United States)+233 days ago
$178,875–$320,650
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