ZipRecruiter

Log In

1

Principal Research And Development Engineer Jobs in Seattle, WA

Microsoft

Principal Research Engineer

Redmond, WA · On-site

Overview Microsoft Research Americas is seeking a Principal Research Engineer to help advance how ... You will deepen your experience in foundation model development, model evaluation, and large-scale ...

Auger

Principal Software Development Engineer

Bellevue, WA · On-site

$151K - $203K/yr

The Principal Software Development Engineer will lead data-centric software engineering efforts, ensuring data correctness and operability while designing and implementing AI frameworks across ...

Samprasoft

Senior SDET

Seattle, WA · On-site

$57 - $73.50/hr

Principal Duties and Responsibilities: Understanding the flow of code and how it interacts with ... Researching test tools, methodologies, and trends and upgrading existing practices and processes.

F5, Inc.

Principal Software Development Engineer

Seattle, WA · On-site

$153K - $206K/yr

As a software engineer specializing in products and services, you will bring a modern, agile development mindset to your work. As a Principal SDE, your primary responsibility will be to develop ...

Samprasoft

Senior SDET

Seattle, WA · On-site

$57 - $73.50/hr

Principal Duties and Responsibilities: Understanding the flow of code and how it interacts with ... Researching test tools, methodologies, and trends and upgrading existing practices and processes.

Oracle

Principal Software Development Engineer

Seattle, WA · On-site

$153K - $206K/yr

As a Principal Software Development Engineer in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Security Platform division, you will play a critical leadership role in the architecture, evolution, and delivery ...

next page

Showing results 1-20

All JobsPrincipal Research And Development Engineer JobsPrincipal Research And Development Engineer Jobs in Seattle, WA

Principal Research And Development Engineer information

See Seattle, WA salary details

$84.2K

$167.5K

$241.8K

How much do principal research and development engineer jobs pay per year?

As of Sep 12, 2026, the average yearly pay for principal research and development engineer in Seattle, WA is $167,540.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $134,900.00 and $196,900.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.
Principal Research And Development Engineer jobs near you

Principal Research Engineer

Redmond, WA • On-site

Microsoft
Computer and Computer Peripheral Equipment and Software Wholesalers • 10K+ employees
Learn more about Microsoftexternal

Full-time

Re-posted yesterday

Microsoft rating

8.6

Company rating: 8.6 out of 10

Based on 134 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

Job description

Overview
Microsoft Research Americas is seeking a Principal Research Engineer to help advance how foundation models are trained, adapted, evaluated, and improved. You will work with researchers and engineers to turn promising model ideas into reproducible experiments and measurable improvements that can support multiple research initiatives.
In this role, you will lead hands-on work across model pretraining, continued pretraining, fine-tuning, and post-training. You will deepen your experience in foundation model development, model evaluation, and large-scale experimentation while partnering with machine learning systems and infrastructure specialists to scale successful approaches across GPU clusters. This role is based in Redmond, Washington, with an expectation of three days per week in the office.
Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.
Responsibilities
  • Lead model-training programs spanning pretraining from scratch when appropriate, continued pretraining of existing base models, supervised fine-tuning, and post-training.
  • Improve model quality through changes to model architecture, training data, learning objectives, optimizers, hyperparameters, and end-to-end training recipes.
  • Design and implement controlled experiments, ablation studies, and evaluation methods for accuracy, reasoning, robustness, generalization, safety, and domain performance.
  • Diagnose and resolve training instability, convergence failures, numerical issues, data-quality defects, overfitting, catastrophic forgetting, and capability regressions.
  • Own technical and design decisions and develop reusable training, evaluation, experimentation, and model-release practices that support multiple research initiatives.
  • Partner with machine learning systems and infrastructure specialists to scale successful approaches across GPU clusters, improve training efficiency, and ensure reliable and reproducible execution.
  • Provide technical direction across research and engineering teams, mentor engineers, communicate trade-offs, and translate ambiguous goals into measurable milestones.

Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, Python, C, C++, C#, or Java
    • OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:
  • Master's Degree or Doctorate in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, Python, C, C++, C#, or Java
    • OR Bachelor's Degree in a related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, Python, C, C++, C#, or Java
    • OR equivalent experience.
  • Experience training language or foundation models, including developing models through pretraining or continuing the training of existing base models.
  • Experience improving model quality through changes to training data, model architecture, learning objectives, optimization methods, hyperparameters, or post-training techniques.
  • Experience developing and debugging machine learning systems using Python and a modern machine learning framework such as PyTorch or JAX.
  • Experience designing model evaluations or ablation studies used to assess training changes and guide technical decisions.
  • Experience with one or more model-adaptation methods, such as continued pretraining, instruction tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, preference optimization, reinforcement-learning-based post-training, or model distillation.
  • Experience diagnosing training instability, convergence, numerical, data-quality, overfitting, forgetting, or model-regression issues.
  • Experience with distributed model training, mixed precision, checkpointing, experiment tracking, GPU performance, or multi-node training.
  • Experience improving training data through filtering, deduplication, mixture design, sampling, tokenization, synthetic data, provenance, or contamination controls.
  • Experience contributing to significant model-training efforts, research publications, patents, open-source machine learning projects, or research-to-product transfers.
  • Experience providing technical direction across ambiguous, cross-functional work, including mentoring engineers and driving execution across team boundaries.
  • Experience applying responsible model-development practices involving privacy, safety evaluation, data governance, documentation, or reproducibility.

#Research #MSRR
Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.

What Microsoft employees say

Pay

Benefits

Hours and flexibility

Workplace

Get the full story on Breakroom

Microsoft logo

About Microsoft

Sourced by ZipRecruiter

Our infrastructure is comprised of a large global portfolio of more than 100 datacenters and 1 million servers. Our foundation is built upon and managed by a team of subject matter experts working to support services for more than 1 billion customers and 20 million businesses in over 90 countries worldwide. With environmental sustainability and optimization at the forefront of our datacenter design and operations, we continue to grow and evolve as we meet the ever-changing business demands that hold Microsoft as a world-class cloud provider.

Industry

Computer and computer peripheral equipment and software wholesalers

Company size

10,000+ Employees

Headquarters location

Redmond, WA, US

Year founded

1975

Social media

FacebookTwitter

View All Microsoft Jobs

Apply