Research Scientist

The Microsoft Spatial AI Lab in Zurich, Switzerland, is a research and development team building the future of spatial computing. We are looking for computer vision and machine learning scientists who share our passion for developing innovative technology that can be deployed to the cloud and utilized by millions of users. We are based near ETH Zurich, the top technical school in continental Europe, enabling close collaboration in multiple areas.

You will conduct research at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning/AI, robotics and cloud computing. This research will help humans and robotic agents to understand the environment, recognize objects, and perform tasks.

This opportunity will allow you to grow your expertise in Spatial AI, learn more about deployment of algorithms to Copilot+ PCs with neural processing unit (NPU) or to cloud environments and supervise interns or be involved in joint research projects with ETH.

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

• Works within a team to achieve goals and objectives across services, including understanding user requirements, design, and coding.
• Brings the State of the Art to Products - collaborates in an interdisciplinary team to bridge the gap between research and development.
• Grows expertise in one or more subareas of research.
• Develops a deep understanding of tools, technologies and methods that can be utilized to deploy product-grade, robust and efficient code in the cloud.
• Grows our relationships with the research community. May contribute to publications, workshops, or the supervision of interns & PhD/MS students.

Qualifications
Required Qualification(s):

• PhD in Computer Vision or AI/Machine Learning or Robotics or similar professional experience.
• Demonstrated coding, debugging, and engineering skills in programming languages such as C++ or Python.
• Hands-on experience with deep learning and/or computer vision methods.
• Self-motivated team-player, problem solver, and keen to learn.
• Ability to present complex technical concepts to a diverse audience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior research in one or more of the following areas:
• 3D scene reasoning with open vocabularies, Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
• Experience with deep learning models like transformers and attention mechanisms for sequence modeling.
• Video understanding, action and activity recognition.
• Experience with spatio-temporal feature extraction techniques.
• Object detection and semantic segmentation.
• Robot-environment / robot-human interaction, particularly through natural language.
• Publication record at top-tier conferences and journals (e.g., CVPR, ECCV, ICCV,  NeurIPS, ICLR, CoRL).

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, 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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.