Senior/Principal AI Optimization Software Engineer - Multiple roles

The AI Frameworks Group builds the software foundation that enables Microsoft to deploy and run AI models efficiently across a rapidly evolving set of hardware platforms. Our mission is to ensure that every relevant AI model runs as efficiently as possible on every Microsoft AI accelerator. Because AI powers nearly every Microsoft product and service, our work has a direct impact on the performance, scalability, and profitability of the entire company. At Microsoft’s scale, even modest improvements in efficiency can have an outsized impact on infrastructure costs, making this one of the highest-impact engineering opportunities in the company.  We are looking for AI Optimization experts who are passionate about pushing the limits of AI performance through ML algorithm innovation, advanced AI compilation and hardware optimization, runtime and serving optimizations, and innovations in distributed execution. You will work across the AI software stack, partnering with model, systems, compiler, and hardware teams to deliver breakthroughs in performance, scalability, and efficiency for Microsoft’s AI workloads across every hardware platform.

Coding Leads by example across teams and mentors others to produce extensible, maintainable, well-tested, secure, and performant code used across products that adheres to design specifications. Leads efforts to continuously improve code performance, testability, maintainability, effectiveness, and cost, while learning about and accounting for relevant trade-offs. Identifies best practices and coding patterns (e.g., leveraging state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence [GenAI], approaches to source code organization, naming conventions) and provides deep expertise in the coding and validation strategy. Creates and applies metrics to drive code quality and stability, appropriate coding patterns, and best practices. Identifies and anticipates blockers or unknowns during the development process, escalates them, communicates how they will impact timelines, and then leads efforts to identify and implement strategies and/or opportunities to address them. Reviews product code and test code to ensure it meets team standards, contains the correct test coverage, and is appropriate for the product or solution area. Brings insight to code reviews to help improve code quality, coaching and providing feedback to develop other engineers' skills. Conducts code reviews in a timely fashion that helps accelerate the pace of development on the team. Considers diagnosability, reliability, testability, and maintainability when reviewing code, and understands when code is ready to be shared or delivered. Applies and reviews for coding patterns, security risks, compliance issues, and best practices in code reviews, providing feedback on code to drive adherence to best practices. Uses automated source code analysis tools that are incorporated into the build/development process. Design Owns and leads efforts and discussions for the architecture of aspects of complex products/solutions (e.g., design, cost). Leads the testing and exploration of various design options across a set of complex product/solution scenarios, ensuring the strengths and weaknesses of each option are outlined and making recommendations for which design option is best. Creates proposals for architecture and design documents, and leads testing of hypotheses and proposed complex solutions. Shares and acts on findings from investigations, owns design decisions, and oversees the less experienced team members. Leads the development of design documents that support user stories and other product requirements. Evaluates new technologies to solve classes of problems, and determines how to integrate these technologies within existing systems. Leads design discussions with the team and shares findings/learnings from investigations, holding ownership for design decisions. Leads efforts to ensure system architecture and