Bio

Jiang Daxin is a Chinese computer scientist. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of StepFun, the Shanghai-headquartered foundation-model company he established in 2023, and a former Microsoft Global Vice President and Chief Scientist. He spent sixteen years at Microsoft, including at Microsoft Research Asia and the Software Technology Center Asia, working on Bing search, the Cortana voice assistant, Azure cognitive services, and Microsoft 365 natural-language processing.

Education

Jiang completed a doctorate in computer science at the University at Buffalo. Pre-doctoral degrees and birth year are not publicly disclosed in English-language sources.

Career

Jiang held a position as assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore from November 2005 through December 2006, then moved to Microsoft in March 2007. He spent his first four years at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) in Beijing, the Microsoft research lab co-founded by Zhang Hongjiang, in lead-researcher and researcher roles. From October 2011 onward he transitioned to product engineering and management roles in Microsoft's Software Technology Center Asia (STCA), eventually becoming Microsoft Global Vice President and Chief Scientist.

The Microsoft period spanned sixteen years and covered work across Bing search ranking and reasoning, the Cortana voice assistant, Azure cognitive services, and Microsoft 365 natural-language processing. Specific paper-level contributions across the engineering and product portfolios are not consolidated in publicly available summaries.

He left Microsoft to co-found StepFun in Shanghai in 2023, following the November 2022 release of ChatGPT and the broader wave of Chinese frontier-AI startups that emerged in early 2023. The StepFun co-founders include fellow Microsoft alumni Jiao Binxing (search) and Zhu Yibo (systems). The company has shipped a sequence of multimodal Step models alongside specialized Step models for image, video, and audio.

Notable contributions

Jiang's published record covers natural-language processing, information retrieval, and conversational AI from the Microsoft period, with citation across SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, and similar venues.

• Microsoft Bing search (2007 onward). Research and product contributions to Bing search ranking and reasoning.
• Microsoft Cortana voice assistant. Contributions to the voice-assistant product.
• Azure cognitive services and Microsoft 365 NLP. Contributions to Microsoft's enterprise AI services and Office product.
• Microsoft Global Vice President and Chief Scientist. Senior role at Microsoft prior to the StepFun founding.
• StepFun founding (2023). Co-founded the Shanghai-headquartered foundation-model company.
• Step model line. Multimodal Step foundation models alongside specialized Step models for image, video, and audio generation.

Affiliations

• Nanyang Technological University, Singapore: Assistant Professor, November 2005 to December 2006.
• Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA): Lead Researcher / Researcher / Associate Researcher, March 2007 to October 2011.
• Microsoft Software Technology Center Asia (STCA): Senior management roles through Microsoft Global Vice President and Chief Scientist, 2011 onward.
• StepFun: Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2023 to present.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Jiang is among the senior Chinese frontier-lab chief executives whose career routed through Microsoft Research Asia and Microsoft's Beijing engineering organizations. The pattern, which spans most of the senior Chinese AI principals from the late 1990s through the early 2010s, places him in the same MSRA-alumni network as Zhang Hongjiang of the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and others.

The StepFun strategy has emphasized multimodal foundation models from the founding period, distinguishing it from peer Chinese frontier labs that began with text-only language models and later added image and video capability. Industry coverage of the company's positioning in 2025 and 2026 has framed the multimodal-from-the-start orientation as the structural distinguishing feature of StepFun against DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Z.AI.

Birth year is not publicly disclosed in English-language sources.

Sources

• Daxin Jiang LinkedIn. LinkedIn profile with the Microsoft and StepFun role timeline.
• What is StepFun?. The Wire China long-form profile of the company and its founders.
• Daxin Jiang Crunchbase. Crunchbase entry.
• Daxin Jiang Google Scholar. Google Scholar profile with publication record.
• Chinese AI can benefit from bigger models, more data, says start-up founder. South China Morning Post profile.