Senior Researcher - Self-Evolving Agentic Systems
Microsoft · Posted Oct 19
Software, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and hardware services
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About the role
Microsoft Research India is a research lab advancing innovation across Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Theory, Technology and Empowerment, and Systems. The team is building self-evolving agentic systems: LLM-based agents that improve their own policies, skills, memory, and scaffolding through interaction, feedback, and reinforcement learning. This role advances the state of the art in how LLM-based agents learn and adapt, spanning reinforcement learning algorithms, reward signals, scalable training and evaluation environments, and benchmarks, in collaboration with researchers and product groups across Microsoft.
What you will do
- Lead research on self-evolving agents, including self-improvement loops, experience-driven learning, self-generated curricula, and automatic refinement of agent policies, tools, and memory.
- Design and apply reinforcement learning methods for LLM-based agents, including reward modeling, learning from verifiable and AI feedback, and credit assignment over long, multi-step tasks.
- Build scalable training and evaluation environments for agentic tasks such as coding, tool use, web and computer use, and knowledge work.
- Develop rigorous benchmarks and evaluation methods that measure agent capability, robustness, safety, and improvement over time.
- Form hypotheses, design experiments, and iterate quickly on model and agent performance.
- Publish at top-tier venues, release open-source artifacts, and help shape the research agenda in agentic AI.
- Collaborate with research and product teams across Microsoft to move research advances into real-world systems.
- Mentor interns and early-career researchers and contribute to Microsoft Research India’s academic engagement.
- Embody our culture and values.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- Are passionate about advancing the state of the art in reinforcement learning, LLM post-training, and autonomous agents.
- Have a strong research track record demonstrated through publications at leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, COLM, or similar venues, or through impactful open-source contributions.
- Combine scientific rigor with strong engineering skills and enjoy turning research ideas into working systems.
- Thrive in a highly collaborative research environment.
- Take end-to-end ownership of complex, open-ended research problems.
- PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
- 1+ years of software engineering or research experience.
- Experience with reinforcement learning and LLMs.
- Strong research track record in machine learning, computer systems, or a closely related area.
- Demonstrated ability to conduct independent research and communicate results through publications, prototypes, or other impactful outcomes.
- Ability to work effectively across disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with diverse research and engineering teams.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience building and scaling large AI systems.
- Experience applying reinforcement learning to AI models and agents.
- Experience with reward modeling, reinforcement learning, or other post-training techniques.
- Hands-on experience building datasets for LLM, VLM, or multimodal model pre-training or post-training.
- Experience with synthetic data, model graders, reward signals, hard-example mining, active learning, or data-mixture optimization.
- Experience building feedback loops that connect evaluation, failure mining, data generation, and training.
- Experience with multimodal or agentic datasets, including text, web, GUI, tool-use, or interaction trajectories.
Benefits and support
- Compensation and benefits are detailed in the job posting
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
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
Vice Chair and President
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