Overview
Join the team that powers one of the most heavily used and most visible capabilities in Windows: Search. As Windows evolves into an agent-first, AI-powered operating system, Search is becoming the primary discovery, reasoning, and grounding layer across user journeys and agentic experiences. The Windows Search and AI Platform team is responsible for building the core Search, indexing, and semantic understanding infrastructure that serves more than a billion users worldwide.
This role is for a Principal Researcher with deep prior Search experience who will define and drive the architectural direction of Windows Search and related semantic systems, spanning indexing, retrieval, ranking, reliability, and AI-powered experiences.
As a Principal Researcher on Windows OS Search, you will define the long-term technical vision for Windows Search and semantic retrieval systems and building graph data across systems. You will work across engineering, product, and partner teams to ensure Search is reliable at scale, measurable through quality signals,



and extensible for future agentic scenarios.
We are seeking a visionary and hands-on Principal Researcher to lead the next-generation intelligent search architecture for the Windows Operating System. In this role, you will bridge frontier AI research—spanning local Small Language Models (SLMs), NPU-accelerated dense retrieval, on-device vector indexes, and contextual temporal graphs—with low-level systems engineering.
You will redefine how over a one billion users discover, access, and interact with files, applications, cloud content, and system state, delivering sub-millisecond lexical and semantic search under strict power, memory, and zero-trust privacy constraints.
This role blends deep technical expertise in Search systems with cross-org architectural leadership and solid engineering judgment.
Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come tog

📌 Principal Researcher (Hyderabad)
🏢 Microsoft
📍 Hyderabad