Artificial intelligence
10 Microsoft Research engineers
These ten current and former Microsoft Research engineers have held research engineering and research software engineering roles at Microsoft Research. A reader can learn what research engineering work at Microsoft Research involves from people who have done it.
Professionals to explore
01—10Abhishek Goswami
LinkedInExperience: Principal Research Engineer · Microsoft Research
Principal Research Engineer at Microsoft Research since 2026; a highlight says they build RL pipelines and recipes for small language models and ship the post-trained models in enterprise agents. Abhishek Goswami was Principal Software Engineer. CoreAI, GenAI at Microsoft (2023–2026) and Senior Software Engineer. Azure AI at Microsoft (2019–2023).
Chitrank Gupta
LinkedInExperience: Research Engineer (Microsoft Research) · Microsoft
Research Engineer (Microsoft Research) at Microsoft since 2024, based in Bengaluru according to a highlight. Chitrank Gupta was a Graduate Research Assistant at The University of Texas at Austin (2023–2024) and a Software Engineer Intern at Microsoft in 2020.
Hugo Romat
LinkedInExperience: Senior Research Engineer Microsoft Research · Microsoft
Senior Research Engineer Microsoft Research at Microsoft since 2025, a role the profile tags at senior level in research. Hugo Romat was Senior Applied Scientist Office AI (2024–2025) and Applied Scientist II Office AI (2022–2024) at Microsoft, and Postdoctoral Research Assistant at ETH Zürich (2020–2021).
Lukas M. Maas
LinkedInExperience: Senior Research Software Development Engineer · Microsoft
Senior Research Software Development Engineer at Microsoft since 2020; a highlight says they are a member of the Data Systems group at Microsoft Research, working on the cost-efficiency of Microsoft's database services. Lukas M. Maas was Research Software Development Engineer II at Microsoft (2018–2020).
Nastya Torunova
LinkedInExperience: Senior Research Software Engineer · Microsoft Research Cambridge
Senior Research Software Engineer at Microsoft Research Cambridge since 2025 and Research Software Engineer 2 there (2022–2025), a role a highlight places in the Engineering and Technical department. Nastya Torunova was Software Engineer at Tinkoff (2016–2022), according to their profile.
Safoora Yousefi
LinkedInExperience: Senior RSDE · Microsoft
Senior RSDE at Microsoft since 2024, a role a highlight places in Microsoft Research AI Frontiers. Safoora Yousefi is also listed as Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Microsoft since 2022 and was Applied Scientist II at Microsoft (2020–2022) and Postdoctoral Researcher at Emory University (2019).
Sam Yeh
LinkedInExperience: Principal Research Software Development Engineer, Microsoft Research · Microsoft
Principal Research Software Development Engineer, Microsoft Research at Microsoft since 2021; a highlight says the work advances the state of the art in human-computer conversation. Sam Yeh was Sr. Tech Lead and Product Manager (2019–2020) and Sr. Tech Lead (2017–2018) at Expedia.
Sonu Mehta
LinkedInExperience: Senior Research Software Development Engineer · Microsoft Research
Senior Research Software Development Engineer at Microsoft Research since 2021 and Research Software Development Engineer II there (2018–2021). Sonu Mehta has also held Senior Research Software Engineer/Director Intern Program since 2024 and Senior Research Software Engineering Manager/ Director Intern Program since 2026 at Microsoft Research.
Vaish Shrivastava
LinkedInExperience: Former Research Engineer II · Microsoft
Research Engineer II at Microsoft (2024–2025); a highlight says they worked as a research engineer at MSR on LLM agents, synthetic data and reasoning. Vaish Shrivastava has been Senior Research Scientist at Microsoft since 2025 and was Applied Scientist at Microsoft (2019–2022).
Yi Shan
LinkedInExperience: Senior Research Engineer, Microsoft Research · Microsoft
Senior Research Engineer, Microsoft Research at Microsoft since 2020 and Research Engineer II, Microsoft Research (2019–2020); a highlight says the work focuses on hard problems in database management systems. Yi Shan was Software Engineer II, Azure at Microsoft (2017–2018).
Choose the right perspective
Match the person's research area to your question, since language model, data systems and conversational AI work call for different skills. Check whether they are current or former research engineers and which years they held the role, and match that era to your decision.
Questions to take into the conversation
- 01How does a research engineer's work differ from a product software engineer's at a large company?
- 02How do research prototypes get handed to product teams, and what usually goes wrong?
- 03Which skills matter most for engineers who want to move into industrial research?
Reaching Microsoft Research engineers
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About this directory
This is a professional research starting point based on business profile data retrieved on . Titles and companies reflect that source snapshot; roles marked former had ended by then. Check the linked profiles for current details. Inclusion does not imply Instant Expert membership or availability.
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