The interview process for a place like Microsoft Research is essentially the same as for a faculty position - give a talk on your research, spend the day talkin

The interview process for a place like Microsoft Research is essentially the same as for a faculty position - give a talk on your research, spend the day talking to researchers about your research, their research, convince them you have an interesting research agenda. Have dinner with more researchers, for a notionally more relaxed discussion :) [Tried, failed ;)] As with university recruitment, this isn't a case of "you must come from specific pipelines", but of "you must have done interesting research, have an interesting plan". It's just that those two criteria are strongly correlated...