Member of Technical Staff, Software Co-Design AI HPC Systems - MAI Superintelligence Team

Microsoft
no specific locations mentioned2026-02-12onsite

About the job

Our team’s mission is to architect, co-design, and productionize next-generation AI systems at datacenter scale. We operate at the intersection of models, systems software, networking, storage, and AI hardware, optimizing end-to-end performance, efficiency, reliability, and cost. Our work spans today’s frontier AI workloads and directly shapes the next generation of accelerators, system architectures, and large-scale AI platforms. We pursue this mission through deep hardware–software co-design, combining rigorous systems thinking with hands-on engineering. The team invests heavily in understanding real production workloads large-scale training, inference, and emerging multimodal models and translating those insights into concrete improvements across the stack: from kernels, runtimes, and distributed systems, all the way down to silicon-level trade-offs and datacenter-scale architectures.

Responsibilities

Lead the co-design of AI systems across hardware and software boundaries, spanning accelerators, interconnects, memory systems, storage, runtimes, and distributed training/inference frameworks.

Drive architectural decisions by analyzing real workloads, identifying bottlenecks across compute, communication, and data movement, and translating findings into actionable system and hardware requirements.

Co-design and optimize parallelism strategies, execution models, and distributed algorithms to improve scalability, utilization, reliability, and cost efficiency of large-scale AI systems.

Develop and evaluate what-if performance models to project system behavior under future workloads, model architectures, and hardware generations, providing early guidance to hardware and platform roadmaps.

Partner with compiler, kernel, and runtime teams to unlock the full performance of current and next-generation accelerators, including custom kernels, scheduling strategies, and memory optimizations.

Influence and guide AI hardware design at system and silicon levels, including accelerator microarchitecture, interconnect topology, memory hierarchy, and system integration trade-offs.

Lead cross-functional efforts to prototype, validate, and productionize high-impact co-design ideas, working across infrastructure, hardware, and product teams.

Mentor senior engineers and researchers, set technical direction, and raise the overall bar for systems rigor, performance engineering, and co-design thinking across the organization.

Qualifications

Minimum

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Preferred

Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience. Strong background in one or more of the following areas: AI accelerator or GPU architectures; Distributed systems and large-scale AI training/inference; High-performance computing (HPC) and collective communications; ML systems, runtimes, or compilers; Performance modeling, benchmarking, and systems analysis; Hardware–software co-design for AI workloads. Proficiency in systems-level programming (e.g., C/C++, CUDA, Python) and performance-critical software development. Proven ability to work across organizational boundaries and influence technical decisions involving multiple stakeholders. Experience designing or operating large-scale AI clusters for training or inference. Deep familiarity with LLMs, multimodal models, or recommendation systems, and their systems-level implications. Experience with accelerator interconnects and communication stacks (e.g., NCCL, MPI, RDMA, high-speed Ethernet or InfiniBand). Background in performance modeling and capacity planning for future hardware generations. Prior experience contributing to or leading hardware roadmaps, silicon bring-up, or platform architecture reviews. Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in systems, architecture, or ML systems are a plus.