Principal Researcher - Agentic AI - Microsoft Research AI Frontiers

Microsoft
United States, Washington, Redmond / United States, New York, New York2026-05-05onsite

About the job

As a Principal Researcher – Agentic AI, you will play a crucial role in modeling agentic intelligence: developing agents that learn to self-correct, specialize and collectively improve through self-play as well as interaction. The role spans research on recursive self-improvement using self-generated data, adaptive coordination and delegation across multiple models, continual learning without catastrophic forgetting, human-AI collaboration for long-horizon tasks, and autonomous skill acquisition driven by interaction-identified gaps. This role encompasses the full research-to-deployment spectrum, requiring an active focus on building robust evaluation frameworks and high-fidelity synthetic data pipelines. You will also be instrumental in refining the underlying architectures to ensure agentic systems scale effectively in complex environments.

Responsibilities

As a Principal Researcher in the AI Frontiers lab, you will perform cutting-edge research in collaboration with other researchers, engineers, and product groups. As a member of a word-class research organization, you will be a part of research breakthroughs in the field and will be given an opportunity to realize your ideas in products and services used worldwide.

Qualifications

Minimum

Doctorate in Computer Science or relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience OR Master's Degree in Computer Science or relevant field AND 4+ years related research experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or relevant field AND 6+ years related research experience OR equivalent experience.

Preferred

Experience with building and evaluating agentic models. Research record demonstrated by public artifacts like models, tools, code in AI space or publications at the following conferences: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, COLM. Expertise in the technical scaling of models and a commitment to engineering excellence, including the development of generalized code and robust research infrastructure. Experience publishing academic papers as a lead author or essential contributor in the field of Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing and/or reinforcement learning. Experience participating in a top conference in relevant research domain (i.e. organizing a workshop, hackathon, community engagement/relations). Demonstrable ability to define an ambitious, original research agenda. Ability to collaborate, communicate effectively, and technically lead multi-disciplinary team. Keen interest in real-world applications and impact.