Senior Researcher - AI Computer Architecture

The future of AI is being built not just in software, but in the physics of light. Our Future AI Infrastructure (FAI) team at Microsoft Research Cambridge is pioneering new hardware and system technologies to fundamentally reshape how AI systems scale — breaking through the bandwidth, latency, and energy walls that constrain today's accelerator architectures. You will join a team at the frontier of AI system design, where novel photonic hardware meets the rapidly evolving demands of large-scale AI workloads. Here, your ideas won't stay on paper — you will work alongside world-class researchers and industry partners to translate architectural vision into working silicon and system prototypes that define the next generation of AI infrastructure. As an AI systems architect with expertise in computer architecture, you will be the core member designing and evaluating future AI computer-system architectures that leverage novel optical interconnects and memory technologies for scale-up networking, memory offloading, and memory disaggregation. You will collaborate closely with experts in adjacent disciplines including optics, networking, distributed systems, and compiler optimisation, to innovate and design overall beneficial solutions to large scale AI infrastructure problems. You will build system models and architectural simulations to explore the design space, conduct ML-system co-design to align hardware capabilities with the demands of agentic AI and large-scale inference workloads, and contribute to software system prototypes that validate architectural concepts end-to-end. You will also collaborate closely with external industry partners to drive hardware proof-of-concept development and inform production roadmaps. This opportunity will allow you to shape the architectural blueprint of next-generation AI systems from the ground up, build deep cross-stack expertise spanning photonics, memory systems, networking, and AI workloads, and develop a unique industry network through hands-on collaboration with leading hardware partners. 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.