Applied Scientist II

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

6d

About The Position

Come build the core of Microsoft Copilot for enterprise with the Microsoft Turing Team, where you'll join a collaborative group of applied scientists and engineers pushing the frontier of large language models (LLMs) to improve the productivity of hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Our team is responsible for the core systems that power Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, delivering intelligence, quality, and transformative new features. We work at the intersection of research and engineering—advancing orchestrator reasoning, training next‑generation models, and shipping impactful, model‑driven experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot. We are hiring an Applied Scientist II who will contribute directly to this work.
As an Applied Scientist, you will:
Evolve our orchestrator to reason more effectively, respond faster, and support new capabilities in multi‑modality, agent‑based systems, and beyond.
Advance state‑of‑the‑art model training—including fine‑tuning, reinforcement learning, high‑quality data curation, and experimentation with frontier model training.
Build and deliver model‑driven features end‑to‑end—from development and evaluation to metrics and A/B testing.
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.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 2+ 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 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field
• OR equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role.
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 5+ 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 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
• OR equivalent experience.
• 1+ year(s) experience creating publications (e.g., patents, peer-reviewed academic papers).
• 1+ year(s) experience creating publications at top conferences like ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing), SIGKDD (Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining), AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining), COLING (International Conference on Computational Linguistics), WWW (World Wide Web Conference), NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), ICASSP (International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing), etc.

Responsibilities

• Master a broad research area and understand relevant research techniques.
• Act as a team expert on industry trends, products, and advances, applying this knowledge to influence product needs.
• Review business and product requirements, incorporate research insights, and provide strategic guidance for problem‑solving.
• Ensure scientific rigor, support method development, and apply expertise to drive business impact.
• Identify and inspire peers and new research talent to join Microsoft, build relationships, and advocate for research initiatives.
• Share research findings through industry outreach, collaborate with the academic community, and support recruiting pipeline development.
• Document experimentation and results to promote innovation.
• Provide guidance on capturing processes and contribute to ethics and privacy policies related to research practices and data collection.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees