Principal Researcher
Microsoft · Posted Sep 15
Software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and hardware services
Hyderabad, Telangana, IndiaFull-timeOnsiteLead/Staff6–15 years₹1.0Cr–₹2.2Cr yearly100+ applicants
SoftwareCloud ComputingArtificial IntelligenceConsumer ElectronicsInformation TechnologyPublic Company
Full time
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About the role
The Windows Search and AI Platform team builds the core Search, indexing, and semantic understanding infrastructure that serves more than a billion users worldwide, powering one of the most heavily used and most visible capabilities in Windows as it evolves into an agent-first, AI-powered operating system. This Principal Researcher role blends frontier AI research—local Small Language Models (SLMs), NPU-accelerated dense retrieval, on-device vector indexes, and contextual temporal graphs—with low-level systems engineering, defining the long-term technical vision and architectural direction for Windows OS Search, indexing, retrieval, ranking, reliability, and AI-powered experiences under strict power, memory, and zero-trust privacy constraints.
What you will do
- Research & Architectural Roadmap: Define the multi-year vision for Windows OS search, context-aware indexing, semantic file retrieval, and OS-level neural search systems.
- On-Device AI & NPU Optimization: Design, adapt, and compress state-of-the-art SLMs and embedding models (via quantization, pruning, and distillation) for local execution on NPUs, GPUs, and CPUs via frameworks like ONNX Runtime/DirectML.
- Core OS & Storage Integration: Architect low-latency vector indexing structures and hybrid search rankers integrated into the OS file system and runtime, ensuring minimal system memory footprint and battery drainage.
- Contextual & Semantic Graph Retrieval: Design algorithms that synthesize user activity context, application telemetry, and semantic relationships without compromising user privacy or shipping raw data off-device.
- Zero-Trust & Local Privacy: Guarantee zero-trust computational isolation where search indexing, embedding generation, and contextual ranking remain strictly on-device.
- Cross-Disciplinary Leadership: Partner closely with Core OS Systems Engineering, Hardware Acceleration Teams, Silicon Partners (Intel, AMD, Qualcomm), and Product UX teams to ship research innovations into production releases.
- IP & Scientific Visibility: Drive strategic patent filings, publish in top-tier IR/AI venues, and mentor senior researchers and engineering leads across the division.
- Define the long-term architectural direction for Windows Search, including indexing pipelines, retrieval systems, ranking, and semantic enrichment.
- Serve as the research authority for Search-related design reviews, tradeoff discussions, and platform decisions.
- Drive research clarity across boundaries: Search Platform, Indexer, AI models, telemetry, reliability, and user-facing surfaces.
- Anticipate future needs for agentic and AI-driven Search, identifying capability gaps and guiding multi-year investments.
- Partner with Product Managers to translate customer scenarios into durable technical primitives and measurable quality signals.
- Mentor senior engineers and architects, raising the bar on design rigor, system thinking, and operational excellence.
- Influence engineering standards, design patterns, and best practices across Search and adjacent platform teams.
Skills used in this role
Search SystemsInformation RetrievalSemantic SearchVector SearchBM25HNSWDiskANNApproximate Nearest NeighborRe-rankingKnowledge GraphsSmall Language ModelsEmbedding ModelsQuantizationPruningDistillationONNX RuntimeDirectMLCore MLTensorRTNPUSIMDAVXNEONGPUC++RustMultithreadingConcurrencyOperating SystemsMachine LearningNLPFederated LearningDifferential PrivacyAgentic AI
What the employer is looking for
- Doctorate in relevant field AND 6+ years related research experience.
- OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 7+ years related research experience.
- OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 9+ years related research experience.
- OR equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are 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.
- Search & Retrieval Systems: Expert knowledge of hybrid search architectures (combining BM25/lexical indices with dense vector embeddings), approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search algorithms (e.g., HNSW, DiskANN), and re-ranking pipelines.
- On-Device ML Acceleration: Hands-on experience optimizing and deploying ML models under tight compute, latency, and thermal budgets using ONNX Runtime, DirectML, CoreML, or TensorRT.
- Systems Programming: Advanced proficiency in C++ (C++17/20) or Rust, with a deep understanding of multi-threading, memory alignment, OS file systems, and concurrency control.
- Hardware & Silicon Co-Design: Familiarity with NPU architectures, SIMD instruction sets (AVX/NEON), GPU compute kernels, and memory-bandwidth trade-offs on heterogeneous SoC architectures.
- Privacy-Preserving Computation: Knowledge of federated learning techniques, differential privacy, and local secure enclave execution for contextual intelligence.
- Strategic Ambiguity Navigation: Capability to convert broad, exploratory research concepts into concrete, executable system architectures.
- Influence Without Authority: Proven track record of guiding cross-functional teams spanning pure AI researchers, hardware vendors, and core OS engineers toward a unified...
Preferred qualifications
- 15+ years of experience shipping commercial software or platform technologies at scale.
- Prior experience owning or architecting end-to-end Search platforms (system, web, enterprise, or OS-level).
- Experience with semantic search, vector search, knowledge graphs, context-retrieval and content understanding systems.
- Familiarity with Windows platform internals, diagnostics, and performance tooling.
- Experience designing Search systems that power agentic workflows or AI-driven user experiences.
- Solid track record of improving architectural health, reliability, and operational maturity of complex systems.
- Demonstrated success influencing product and technical direction across multiple organizations.
- Education: Ph.D. or Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval, Systems Engineering, or related quantitative discipline.
- Experience: 8+ years (Ph.D.) or 10+ years (Master's/B.S.) of post-academic research or industry software engineering experience in Information Retrieval, Applied NLP, Machine Learning Systems, or Operating Systems.
- Track Record: Proven record of either high-impact scientific publications (e.g., SIGIR, KDD, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP). OR successful deployment of large-scale search engines, client-side ML pipelines, or OS-level indexing features in commercial operating systems.
Benefits and support
- 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.
About Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is a multinational technology company that develops, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products, services, and hardware devices. Best known for its Windows operating systems, Microsoft 365 productivity suite, and Xbox gaming consoles, the company has expanded heavily into enterprise cloud computing via Azure and advanced artificial intelligence solutions. As one of the world's most valuable public enterprises, it empowers individuals and businesses globally through innovative digital transformation.
- Industry
- Software
- Company size
- 228,000+ employees
- Founded
- April 4, 1975
- Location
- Redmond, Washington, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Leadership
SN
Satya Nadella
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
AH
Amy Hood
Chief Financial Officer
BS
Brad Smith
Vice Chair and President
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