Research Internships at Microsoft provide a dynamic environment for research careers with a network of world-class research labs led by globally-recognized scientists and engineers, who pursue innovation in a range of scientific and technical disciplines to help solve complex challenges in diverse fields, including computing, healthcare, economics, and the environment.

Gray Systems Lab (GSL) is an applied research lab under Azure Data. We do research and development for databases, big-data, and cloud systems, working in close collaboration with product teams to design innovative solutions for real-world problems. Our team is friendly and inclusive. We focus on a variety of exciting areas, including machine learning for systems, reinforcement learning finetuning and post-training techniques, natural language-to-query, agentic workflows, resource management, query optimization and execution. We also work on workload optimization, graph analytics, data storage formats and governance, modern/future hardware (e.g., GPU, NVM and FPGAs), program analysis, and data provenance. Our work covers both internal both Microsoft internal and open-source systems, such as Fabric, Spark, SQL Server, MySQL, Apache Iceberg, and more. We provide opportunities to work on ideas from internal collaborations, as well as external ones with partner universities, and to continue to be an active scholar in the research community.

We are looking for highly motivated graduate students who are interested in cutting edge research in close collaboration with advanced industry product groups. Past internships have resulted in a combination of impact on production systems and publications at top conferences. Applicants should demonstrate a track record in one or more systems, database, or data science topics and an aptitude for hands-on system building and design methodology to run and analyze experiments at scale.