The Office of the CTO is a 2 year old team reporting to Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s CTO and EVP, helping to identify issues/opportunities and define/align technical strategy and concrete action plans with product/research teams across various critical areas in the company (e.g. artificial intelligence, data architectures, developer platforms, intelligent cloud/edge, and web/mobile). We are growing small strong teams of highly motivated people, with relevant practical experience, the ability to drive clarity/crispness from ambiguity, and the capability to drive consensus across leaders, to empower each of these areas. 

We keep close track of, and often play and become familiar with, many relevant product/research efforts across the company, the industry (competition and startups), the open source community, and the research world in order to maintain a good perspective of the area, maintaining the necessary balance between breadth and depth to be effective. In addition, we engage closely with many contributors and leaders from the relevant product/research teams (PMs, engineers, scientists, GPMs, EMs, DEs/TFs, VPs) to educate our point of view on issues/opportunities and together define concrete action plans to tackle these. In the process, we provide insights to the SLT, connect people, drive company-wide workstreams, bootstrap POC efforts, and engage on activities that move the needle on Microsoft’s strategic and technical direction.  

This job posting is for a Principal Program Manager working on the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The goal is to empower our customers and internal product teams with the most powerful, differentiated, easy-to-use, and cost-effective AI/ML platform by looking at the full stack – across hardware, system software and frameworks/tools. 

We are looking for someone with hands on experience on the lifecycle of AI/ML (training, experimentation, deployment, inference) using a range of frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow), platforms (e.g. Azure ML, AWS SageMaker, Google CloudAI) and infrastructure (e.g. hardware accelerators like GPUs and FPGAs). Someone who has an appreciation for systems thinking, who can rationalize the different components of an AI stack, e.g. for parallel training, and the practical implications of model/data/pipeline parallelization. Someone who has developed good intuition for what promotes and impacts the adoption/engagement of AI platforms/frameworks, through practical experience. Someone who likes to stay informed on the latest announcements/updates from these, and the latest news from the research/community (e.g. BERT and GPT2). 

Responsibilities

• Help shape the differentiation and innovation strategy for Microsoft’s AI/ML Platform and Infrastructure becoming a trusted advisor to the relevant product/research teams 
• Coordinate potentially complex cross-team efforts across hardware and software contributing towards the Microsoft AI stack  
• Keep close track of, and often play with, a range of AI/ML platforms, frameworks and hardware from Microsoft, the competition, open source community, and startups to identify and prioritize our top issues/opportunities 

• Keep close track of the AI/ML research efforts inside and outside Microsoft to identify productization opportunities for further differentiation 
• Engage the relevant product/research teams to across the company to educate your point of view on issues/opportunities and together define concrete action plans to tackle these 
• Bootstrap and orchestrate company-wide projects requiring collaboration across product/research teams while sharing a common strategic vision 
• Generate crisp reading materials for CTO and other Senior Leaders with summations, prioritized lists of issues/opportunities, and concrete plans 

Qualifications

Required: 

• 10+ years of demonstrated experience in Technical Program Management, Software Engineering, or Data Science 
• 2+ years of hands on experience with applied Data Science, Machine Learning, or Artificial Intelligence. Familiar with the lifecycle of DS/AI/ML (training, experimentation, deployment, inference) using a range of frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow) and platforms (e.g. Azure ML, AWS SageMaker, Google CloudAI). 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related Engineering field 

Preferred: 

• Experience leveraging parallel model training, and ideally optimizing the training/inference of models over GPUs/FPGAs 
• Acknowledged as an expert in the technical domain with reputation as a credible thought leader 

• Ability to handle high ambiguity, drive clarity, and identify/prioritize issues and opportunities  
• Ability to communicate thoughts in a clear/crisp manner to Senior Leaders 
• Ability to build relationships with thought leaders from open source communities, industry, and research 
• Master or PhD in Computer Science or related Engineering field preferred  

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.