{"id":1933105,"url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-senior-ai-performance-architect","title":"Senior AI Performance Architect","company":{"id":18,"name":"Microsoft","domain":"microsoft.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/microsoft","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Eightfold","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":68,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-08T05:49:30Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Mountain View, United States","Boston, United States","Washington, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":119800,"max":234700,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":234700},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"OneDrive","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":true},{"name":"CUDA","optional":true},{"name":"CUDA Toolkit","optional":true},{"name":"KV Cache","optional":true},{"name":"Mixture of Experts","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"ROCm","optional":true},{"name":"Speculative Decoding","optional":true},{"name":"Triton","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-28T14:31:15Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-09T01:44:27Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":10,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":10},"description":"OverviewDo you want to be at the forefront of innovating the latest hardware designs to propel Microsoft’s cloud growth? Are you seeking a unique career opportunity that combines technical capabilities, cross-team collaboration, with business insight and strategy?\nMicrosoft’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 achieve 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. In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.\nJoin the Systems Planning and Architecture (SPARC) team within Microsoft’s Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure (AHSI) organization, the team behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission. Microsoft delivers more than 200 online services to more than one billion individuals worldwide, and AHSI is the team behind our expanding cloud infrastructure. We deliver the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's cloud businesses including Microsoft Azure, Bing, MSN, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Teams and Xbox Live.\nWe are seeking a Senior AI Performance Architect to help shape the next generation of Microsoft AI systems. In this role, you will analyze OAI and MSI training and inference workloads, develop analytical models and tools to evaluate system performance, and validate key assumptions through targeted measurements on silicon. You will study interactions across accelerator architecture, memory, networking, and systems software; evaluate trade-offs in performance, scalability, utilization, and cost; and work with MSI and partner teams to guide hardware-software co-design decisions for cloud-scale AI systems.\nResponsibilities\nAnalyze frontier training and inference workloads to identify key performance requirements and bottlenecks.\n\nDevelop and improve analytical models, simulators, and data-analysis tools for AI system performance.\n\nEvaluate trade-offs in performance, scalability, utilization, capacity, and cost across accelerator, memory, network, and software configurations.\n\nStudy hardware-software interactions in large-scale AI systems and translate workload insights into architecture requirements.\n\nWork with MSI and partner teams to evaluate hardware-software co-design options for training and inference.\n\nDevelop and run targeted microbenchmarks on silicon to measure compute, memory, communication, kernel, and synchronization performance.\n\nCompare analytical model predictions with silicon and end-to-end workload measurements, identify gaps, and improve model accuracy.\n\nCommunicate findings and recommendations through clear data visualizations, technical reports, and architecture decision materials.\n\nQualifications\nRequired Qualifications\nMaster's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field AND 3+ years of technical engineering experience; OR Bachelor's Degree in a related field AND 5+ years of technical engineering experience; OR equivalent experience. \nOther Requirements\nAbility to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to, the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter. \nPreferred Qualifications\nDoctorate in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years technical engineering experience OR Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience OR equivalent experience\nExperience in AI systems performance, computer architecture, performance modeling, high-performance computing, distributed systems, or accelerator software. \nStrong understanding of computer architecture and the performance interactions among compute, memory, communication, and software. \nExperience with analytical performance modeling, simulation, profiling, workload characterization, or system performance analysis. \nHands-on programming experience in Python and at least one systems or accelerator programming environment such as C++, CUDA, Triton, ROCm/HIP, or an equivalent platform. \nExperience analyzing AI training or inference workloads, including latency, throughput, capacity, utilization, and scaling behavior. \nExperience with transformer-based models, large language model training and inference, attention, KV-cache behavior, mixture-of-experts, or speculative decoding. \nExperience modeling or optimizing distributed execution strategies such as tensor, pipeline, expert, or data parallelism, or prefill/decode disaggregation. \nKnowledge of accelerator architecture, HBM and memory hierarchies, scale-up and scale-out networks, PCIe or other high-speed I/O, kernels, compilers, and runtimes. \nExperience correlating analytical or simulation models with silicon measurements and performing root-cause analysis of performance gaps. \nExperience with data analysis and visualization for performance studies and architecture decisions. \nHardware Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $160,200 - $261,000 per year.\nCertain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:\nhttps://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay\nThis position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.\nMicrosoft 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7128,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Console Games","Cloud Platforms (IaaS & PaaS)","Gaming Consoles","Developer Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-05T22:27:32Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":58,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.578,"p_room":1,"age_days":9,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["conf:1","stale_co","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-08T05:49:30Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":234700,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-senior-ai-performance-architect","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-senior-ai-performance-architect.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-09T02:52:46Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1279,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":3721,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":18},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=18"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-senior-ai-performance-architect"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-senior-ai-performance-architect"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-senior-ai-performance-architect"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/microsoft-senior-ai-performance-architect\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmicrosoft-senior-ai-performance-architect"}]}