Principal Applied Scientist

Job Description

AI has created an unprecedented opportunity to make work better for hundreds of millions of people. Microsoft’s productivity division is hiring a Principal Applied Scientist to help ensure we maximize this amazing opportunity. Our scientists collaborate closely with people across Microsoft’s product teams and Microsoft Research to see their ideas realized in products and services like M365 Copilot, Word, Teams, Windows, Surface, OneDrive, SharePoint, Windows, Surface, Outlook, and PowerPoint. They also contribute back to the scientific community through peer-reviewed publications at top venues, scientific presentations, and beyond.

We are looking for a Principal Applied Scientist who is creative, self-driven, curious, people-oriented and comfortable defining a path through ambiguity towards high-level goals. This role is ideal for candidates passionate about building real-world systems that unify different textual modalities and agentic experiences to power next-generation user experiences across devices and platforms.

As a senior member of the team, you will be a tech lead and drive innovation across model architectures, training, and deployment. You will play a key role in converting cutting-edge research into practical applications and experiences for users across the globe by proven skills in product experiences: understanding requirements, setting partner expectations and communicating across team boundaries.

Research areas of interest include but are certainly not limited to reinforcement learning, agentic systems multimodal modeling, post-training techniques and their application, human-centered artificial intelligence (AI), domain-specific large language model (LLM) applications (e.g. long-form writing assistance), personalization, computational social science, memory, agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), real-time AI systems, collaborative AI, privacy-preserving AI, trustworthy AI, data-centric AI, AI flywheels, and multilingual AI.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

About the team:
The Microsoft Applied Sciences Group incubates disruptive technologies for Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices organization. We are working on groundbreaking technologies that shape how we will interact and communicate with computers, each other and our environment. Operating as a startup within the company, our team works closely with several research and product teams to bring compelling new experiences to the market. A lot of these experiences will be powered by machine learning – and as part of this team, you will be uniquely positioned to bring latest research to life in products that are used by hundreds of millions of people.

https://www.microsoft.com/applied-sciences/

Responsibilities

• Defining, leading, and helping to conduct research projects that simultaneously advance the state-of-the-art and directly benefit Microsoft’s core productivity products.
• Shape product direction by integrating rigorous scientific methods into the product lifecycle.
• Collaborating and coordinating with people in a range of roles, including researchers, engineers, product managers, designers, and other key product stakeholders. Serving as a bridge between research and product.
• Teaching, guiding, and tutoring colleagues without research backgrounds in state-of-the-art techniques and research best practices.
• Sharing your research with others via a range of means, including publication, to enable others to build on your work and to contribute to the understanding of our products as cutting-edge and science driven.
• Effectively communicating with product leaders (and often Microsoft researchers (MSR)) throughout the planning and execution of applied research projects, which often involves learning and teaching complex concepts.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.
• A record of publications in top-tier scientific venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, KDD, WWW, CHI, PNAS, Nature, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL).

Preferred Qualifications:

• 7+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
• 7+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping, using industry standard tools (PyTorch, C++/STL, Huggingface/wnb, AML, CMake).
• 1+ years experience developing agentic systems and natural user interfaces.

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Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.