Senior Technical Program Manager – Future of AI Infrastructure  

You will partner with MSR researchers, Azure engineering teams, and external hardware and software vendors to design technical solutions that span models, systems, and hardware. You will surface the trade-offs and risks behind those choices and make data-driven recommendations to research and engineering leads, and supplier partners. You will define what success looks like for moving research prototypes to general availability, the technical bar, the launch criteria, and the cross-team commitments, and hold MSR, Azure, and supplier stakeholders aligned to it through every program milestone. You will own the program structure end-to-end: roadmap, schedule, staging and rollout plans, and governance for multi-team, multi-quarter efforts that cut across MSR, Azure, and the supplier ecosystem. You will close the loop from production back to research: validate use cases against live workloads, instrument performance and reliability metrics at cloud AI scale, and bring signal from customer engagements back to MSR and Azure teams to shape the next generation of platform investments. Master's or PhD Degree in computer engineering, electrical/electronic engineering, computer science, physics, applied physics, optics/photonics, materials science, or a related field AND 3 to 5 years experience in engineering, product/technical program management, data analysis, or product development 3+ years of experience managing cross-functional and/or cross-team projects. Ability to operate effectively in a multi-disciplinary environment. Excellent communication skills in English, both written and spoken, including the skill to clearly communicate technical results and justify assumptions to diverse technical audiences. Basic understanding of optics and/or photonics, sufficient to engage with researchers and suppliers on technical trade-offs in optical systems. Experience working on research or industry projects related to AI systems design Knowledge of networking and interconnects, broadly defined — datacenter networking, high-speed interconnects, fabrics, or related areas. Familiarity with hardware/system simulation or modeling tools. Knowledge of advanced packaging, co-packaged optics, or memory hierarchies.