Principal Product Manager, Foundational AI Research

Microsoft
San Francisco Bay area, USA / New York City metropolitan area, USA2026-03-23onsite

About the job

As a Principal Product Manager, Foundational Research, you will be advancing the next generation of LLM models working on either (1) pre-training and post-training data and evaluations, (2) training infrastructure, or (3) API and Platform. You will be responsible for working backward from customer needs to prioritize new research, build evals and datasets, and work closely with AI researchers to build and execute project plans.

Responsibilities

Identify and prioritize language / coding / multimodal issues and work with researchers to find a path to resolution.

Create novel data collection tasks for taskers to evaluate models and to collect training data for fine-tuning.

Create model prototypes to prove out new feature directions and scope projects.

Collaborate closely with teams on infrastructure, data engineering, pre-training, post-training, and product feedback

Foster a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and growth.

Advance the AI frontier responsibly

Qualifications

Minimum

Bachelor's Degree AND 8+ years experience in product/service/program management or software development OR equivalent experience.

2+ years direct, hands-on collaboration with model researchers and ML engineers in areas such as training runs, data evaluation, infrastructure, coding, or safety.

Experience building and shipping data pipelines or evaluation systems personally.

Preferred

A technical postgraduate degree is strongly preferred; a PhD is ideal but not mandatory.

Demonstrated ability to bring enterprise or developer products to market by deeply engaging with end customers.