Do you want to be at the forefront of innovating the latest hardware designs to propel Microsoft’s cloud growth? Are you seeking a unique career opportunity that combines both technical capabilities, cross team collaboration, with business insight and strategy?  

Join our Strategic Planning and Architecture (SPARC) team within Microsoft’s Azure Hardware Systems & Infrastructure (AHSI) organization and be a part of the organization behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission.   

Microsoft delivers more than 200 online services to more than one billion individuals worldwide and AHSI is the team behind our expanding cloud infrastructure. We deliver the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's cloud businesses including Microsoft Azure, Bing, MSN, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Teams and Xbox Live.   

The SPARC organization manages Azure’s hardware roadmap from architecture concept through production for all of Microsoft’s current and future on-line services.  This role is for a highly motivated Machine Learning Engineer with a strong background in neural networks and hardware implementation. You will be involved with both model development, data type analysis, ML/HW co-design. 

Responsibilities

• Driving model/hardware codesign 
• Developing and analysing novel LLM architectures 
• Inventing novel low-precision data/number formats for training/inference SOTA LLMs  
• Inventing novel efficient model architectures (e.g., sparse LLMs, attention architecture) 
• Collaborating with data scientists and ML researchers 
• Interfacing with HW architecture teams 
• Interfacing with SW framework teams 

Qualifications

Master's Degree/PhD in Machine learning, Computer Architecture/Systems, High-Performance Computing or related areas. 

3+ years of experience in ML systems/Model optimizations/Efficient model architecture 

Track record of original research and delivering novel results in ML systems area 

Hands on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch/TensorFlow/TensorRT 

Deep knowledge of CNN/transformer architecture and optimization strategies – quantization, sparsity, NAS, sharding, KV Cache, Flash Attention 

Strong programming skills in Python/C/C++ 

Experience in implementing low-level linear algebra/BLAS kernels and performance optimisations 

Knowledge of GPU, TPU or similar NPU accelerator architecture   

Outstanding communication skills 

#SPARCjobs

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.