Member of Technical Staff, Data Research Engineer - MAI Superintelligence Team

Microsoft seeks a Senior Data Research Engineer for its MAI Superintelligence Team in Zürich. The role focuses on building multimodal foundation models through high-quality data curation, pipeline development, and rigorous analysis.

This position is part of the Multimodal team, which is dedicated to developing next-generation foundation models spanning vision, language, and audio. The role serves as a critical bridge between engineering and research, enabling the team to push the boundaries of AI capabilities by ensuring the underlying data is robust, diverse, and effectively utilized.

Responsibilities

• Design and produce high-quality datasets for model training and evaluation, including running ablation studies to determine the most impactful data configurations.
• Build and maintain scalable pipelines for ingesting, preprocessing, filtering, and annotating multimodal data.
• Conduct deep analysis of real-world multimodal datasets to evaluate quality, diversity, and relevance, identifying specific areas for improvement.
• Develop lightweight tools and workflows to support dataset auditing, visualization, and version control.
• Partner with Safety, Ethics, and Governance teams to ensure all datasets adhere to strict standards for privacy, quality, and responsible AI practices.

Requirements

• A Bachelor’s degree in a technical field such as AI, Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Physics, or Engineering, combined with hands-on coding experience in Python and libraries like Pandas and NumPy, or equivalent professional experience.
• Proven background in data analysis or data engineering.
• Strong proficiency in statistical methods and exploratory data analysis techniques.
• Ability to clearly communicate technical insights and findings to both research and product stakeholders.

Nice to have

• A Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, along with advanced coding experience in Python and data libraries.
• Familiarity with large-scale data processing frameworks such as Spark, Ray, or Apache Beam.
• Experience handling large-scale, unstructured, or semi-structured real-world datasets.

What the company offers

• Eligibility for comprehensive benefits and additional compensation packages.

About the company

Microsoft operates with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. The company fosters a culture of inclusion built on respect, integrity, and accountability, encouraging employees to collaborate with a growth mindset to innovate and realize shared goals.

• Empowering individuals and organizations to achieve more through technology.
• Fostering a growth mindset and collaborative innovation.
• Upholding values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create an inclusive environment.