Microsoft

Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics

Microsoft • $130K — $180K *
Redmond, WA 98052In-Person
Consumer Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Today
Be an Early Applicant
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 8+ years technical experience with coding in languages like C, C++, Java, or Python.
  • Master's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 12+ years experience OR equivalent experience with major platforms.
  • Demonstrated ownership of a major platform used in production with accountability for architecture and reliability.
  • Experience with robot learning at scale, including vision-language-action policies.
  • Deep systems-level understanding of perception, learning, planning, and control interactions in autonomous systems.

Responsibilities

  • Own the multi-year technical architecture for the Microsoft Robotics platform and ensure coherence as it scales.
  • Make foundational design decisions determining the integration of robotics software, AI models, and cloud components.
  • Architect systems that meet real-world constraints balancing latency and reliability across environments.
  • Lead evaluation and validation strategies to establish benchmarks for autonomy and performance.
  • Drive resolution of integration failures at the intersection of AI models and production robots through rigorous analysis.
  • Connect classical robotics with modern AI to unify capabilities into a production-grade platform.
  • Establish engineering standards and lead significant technical reviews to improve system quality.

Benefits

  • Work in a leading-edge robotics and AI environment with a strong focus on innovation.
  • Collaborate with a diverse and skilled team across various disciplines and domains.
  • Access to continuous learning opportunities and professional development.
  • Opportunity to mentor and influence the next generation of engineers and technical leaders.
  • Be part of an organization that encourages engagement with open-source and standards communities.
Full Job Description
Overview

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 at the Principal level to set the technical direction for the systems every other engineer, partner, and customer builds on. This is a cross-cutting systems-focused leadership role, not limited to narrowly scoped projects. You will own the hardest problems in the stack and raise the bar for how the team builds and delivers.

Responsibilities
  • Own the multi-year technical architecture for the Microsoft Robotics platform, setting the direction the broader engineering organization, partners, and customers build on, and holding that architecture coherent as it scales across teams and deployments.
  • Make the foundational design decisions that determine how robotics software, AI models, and cloud and edge components fit together, defining the core interfaces and engineering contracts other teams depend on.
  • Architect systems that meet demanding real-world constraints, balancing latency, throughput, compute efficiency, reliability, and cost across cloud and on-robot edge environments.
  • Lead the evaluation and validation strategy that gates what ships, establishing the benchmarks, test approach, and quality bar for autonomy, safety, and task performance across simulation, lab, and field, including safe-autonomy boundaries and human-in-the-loop fallback.
  • Drive the hardest cross-stack technical problems personally, taking on the integration failure modes that emerge where AI models meet production robots, and resolving them through rigorous root-cause analysis of system behavior and field data.
  • Connect classical robotics engineering with modern AI, partnering across foundation-model, perception, manipulation, locomotion, and simulation teams to bring learned capabilities into a common, production-grade platform rather than one-off integrations.
  • Establish the engineering bar for the team, owning design standards and review practices, leading the consequential technical reviews, and lifting the quality, testability, and operability of the systems that matter most.
  • Influence direction across MDQ, Microsoft Research, Azure, hardware and silicon partners, and customers without relying on formal authority, building technical consensus and aligning many teams on a single coherent platform strategy, including representing the platform in the open-source and standards community.
  • Multiply the team's output through technical leadership, mentoring senior and principal engineers and raising the technical ceiling of the organization rather than only its headcount.
  • Track the state of the art across embodied AI, robot learning, robotics middleware, and simulation, and decide deliberately how and when new techniques are incorporated into the platform.
  • Other:
    • Embody our Culture and Values


Qualifications

Required Qualifications:
  • 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, 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 12+ 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 15+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
    • OR equivalent experience.
  • Demonstrated ownership of a major platform, framework, runtime, or large-scale distributed system used in production by other engineering teams, with accountability for its architecture, reliability, and long-term evolution.
  • Experience with robot learning at scale, including vision-language-action policies, foundation models for robotics, imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or embodied artificial intelligence.
  • Experience deploying and operating robots in the real world at fleet scale, including fleet orchestration, over-the-air update systems, observability, and edge runtime on compute-constrained and intermittently connected hardware.
  • Deep systems-level understanding of how perception, learning, planning, control, simulation, and fleet operations interact in deployed autonomous systems, including the failure modes, latency budgets, and trade-offs that emerge at integration boundaries.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead cross-disciplinary technical efforts spanning robotics hardware, perception, learning, planning, simulation, platform infrastructure, field testing, and artificial intelligence and machine learning teams, and to drive consensus across organizational boundaries.
  • Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow senior and principal engineers and to raise the technical bar of an organization through architecture, review, and direction rather than increasing team size.
  • Experience designing and operating machine learning infrastructure and model serving at scale, including inference optimization, low-latency serving, and the versioning, evaluation, and rollback workflows that production models require.
  • Experience with robotics middleware and autonomy tooling such as Robot Operating System (ROS), Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2), Navigation 2 (Nav2), MoveIt, Robot Visualization (RViz), or Foxglove, and the architectural judgment to know where such frameworks fit in a production platform and where they do not.
  • Experience with large-scale simulation and sim-to-real transfer using Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, Drake, Gazebo, or equivalent, including domain randomization, synthetic data generation, and scenario-based validation.
  • Experience with cloud platform engineering, Microsoft Azure preferred, including low-latency edge-to-cloud architectures, high-throughput data pipelines, and graphics processing unit-backed training and inference at scale.
  • Experience with safety-critical or human-in-the-loop autonomy, including evaluation and governance gates and the trust and security controls that regulated and enterprise customers require.
  • Proficiency in C++ and Python, with a track record of building performant, testable, production-quality robotics or systems software, and the judgment to set engineering standards others follow.
  • Published research, open-source platform leadership, patents, standards contributions, or comparable external technical leadership in robotics, autonomous systems, embodied artificial intelligence, machine learning infrastructure, or physical artificial intelligence platforms is a strong plus.

#MicrosoftRobotics #MDQ

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

About Microsoft

Microsoft is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services. Microsoft’s devices and consumer (D&C) licensing segment licenses the Windows operating system and related software, Microsoft Office for consumers, and the Windows Phone operating system. The company’s computing and gaming hardware segment provides Xbox gaming and entertainment consoles and accessories, second-party and third-party video games, and Xbox Live subscriptions; surface devices and accessories; and Microsoft PC accessories. Its phone hardware segment offers Lumia smartphones and other non-Lumia phones. Its D&C segment provides Windows Store, Xbox Live transactions, and Windows phone store; search advertising; display advertising; Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal; first-party video games; and other consumer products and services as well as operating retail stores. Microsoft’s commercial licensing segments license server products, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (CALs); Windows Embedded; Windows operating system; Microsoft Office for business, including Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and related CALs; Microsoft Dynamics business solutions; and Skype. Its commercial segment offers enterprise services, including premier support services and Microsoft consulting services; commercial cloud comprising Office 365 Commercial, other Microsoft Office online offerings, Dynamics CRM Online, and Microsoft Azure; and other commercial products and online services. The company markets and distributes its products through original equipment manufacturers, distributors, and resellers, as well as online.

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Learn more about Microsoft
Size
181,000 employees
Market Cap
$1,762.4 billion
Industry
Enterprise Technology
Net Income
$51.3 billion
Founded
1975
5 Year Trend
+15.5%
Revenue
$153.2 billion
NASDAQ
MSFT
* Ladders Estimates

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