Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

12h • $142,800 - $304,200

About The Position

Microsoft 365 is hiring an applied scientist to build the intelligence behind capacity for the infrastructure powering Microsoft 365 and Copilot. The team forecasts demand at massive scale and develops AI-driven automation to manage infrastructure at runtime, moving operations from manual processes to systems that observe, reason, and act autonomously. The role involves working with large-scale operational data, current AI models, and infrastructure engineers on systems that affect billions of users.

The scientist will help set technical direction and build production AI systems for infrastructure capacity and health. Work includes developing forecasting, anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, automated mitigation, machine learning, and mathematical optimization systems, and taking ideas from prototype through production. The role collaborates with engineering, product, and research teams to set priorities and deliver results.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, a quantitative field, or equivalent experience, plus 6+ years of related experience; or a master's degree in a listed or related field plus 4+ years; or a doctorate in a listed or related field plus 2+ years.
• Master's degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field plus 9+ years of related experience; or a doctorate in a listed or related field plus 6+ years; or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of experience creating publications, such as patents, libraries, or peer-reviewed academic papers.
• 2+ years of experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research or industry community as an invited speaker.
• 5+ years of experience conducting research as part of an academic or industry research program.
• 3+ years of experience developing and deploying live production systems as part of a product team.
• 3+ years of experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle, from ideation to shipping.
• Experience building machine learning or AI solutions in Python, C#, C++, or R, using modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch or scikit-learn, or LLM-based tools and APIs.
• Working knowledge of SQL or a similar query language.
• Ability to explain technical work clearly to non-specialist audiences and work effectively across engineering, product, and research teams.
• Experience building LLM-powered applications and agentic systems, including tool use, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent orchestration, and evaluating agent quality, cost, and latency in production.
• Experience with anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, AIOps, or automated incident mitigation.
• Experience with time-series forecasting.
• Experience taking ML systems from prototype to production, including pipelines, monitoring, and operating services in the cloud.
• Experience with large-scale data platforms such as Azure Data Lake, Spark, Kusto, or Hive.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with mathematical optimization or operations research.

Responsibilities

• Build AI-driven automation, including agentic systems, to manage infrastructure capacity and health at runtime.
• Develop models to detect anomalies and emerging issues in large-scale telemetry, often before customers are affected.
• Build systems for automated root-cause analysis that reason across signals, logs, and dependencies.
• Design automated mitigation that closes the loop from detection to resolution and reduces reliance on manual intervention.
• Develop and scale forecasting models and pipelines to predict capacity needs across Microsoft 365 and Copilot.
• Design machine learning and mathematical optimization models to improve service efficiency, reliability, and performance.
• Take ideas from prototype to production, turning research into durable systems the business depends on.
• Work with engineering, product, and research teams to set priorities and deliver results.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal