Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Are you passionate about building best multimedia search experience on the web and helping billions of internet users find the most relevant and enjoyable image/video content on the web? Unique challenge of multimedia search depends on talents from diversified technical backgrounds. Do you want to work with a group of talented data and applied scientists and distributed system engineers to grow your experience/career in wide range of areas including computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, big data mining, and information retrieval etc.? If so, this applied scientist/ML engineer position on Bing multimedia relevance team will be a great fit for you!
The Bing multimedia Relevance Team develops the advanced search technology that powers Bing multimedia search. We are responsible for delivering the best images/videos for user’s queries and browsing across the globe. It’s more than just finding a web page that matches a query – it’s about training sophisticated machine learned models to drive the ranking, using word embeddings and deep learning to understand the quality of matches, online learning to react quickly to change, natural language processing to understand queries, taking advantage of big data and signals from millions of people across the web. Pulling together and combining information from multiple sources to provide the user with results that best match their intent. Machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, big data mining and information retrieval - it’s all part of the job.
The Bing multimedia Relevance Team is looking for a talented machine learning scientist/engineer to help us deliver our next generation of ranking algorithms. Qualified applicants should have a solid machine learning background, excellent coding skills, and a MS or higher degree in computer science or a related field. We are looking for a self-motivated and passionate individual who is interested in applying machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and data mining to deliver the best search results on the web and make an impact on millions of users. You should have solid problem solving and technical skills, and be able to apply research concepts in new and innovative ways.
This is a fun and fast paced environment, where developers are empowered to innovate. This is a great opportunity to work on something highly strategic to Microsoft, and an opportunity to directly impact millions of users in an exciting area.
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.
Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 12+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
• Solid machine learning / computer vision / natural language processing experience and results in academy or industry. Publications in major ML/IR/NLP/CV conferences. Examples: ICML, NIPS, SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, KDD.
• Experience in open source (spark, hbase, hadoop etc) or microsoft internal tech (cosmos, autopilot, azure) are big plus as well as most of our project/scenario is across system and AI areas.
• Good communication skills and ability to work in collaborative environment.
• Good design and problem-solving skills and an ability to innovate and solve challenging technical problems.
• Passion and self-motivation.
• Embrace engineering excellence and delivering quality results at scale.

Responsibilities

• Analyze problems through all data available to you including large scale crawled data and user engagement data etc.
• Define problems and metrics to address various problems including relevance, authority, attractiveness, diversity, and freshness etc.
• Design and train ML system and model architecture.
• Collect data for training.
• Define engineer life cycle and drive project forwards through iterative ranker releases.
• Understanding search stack and platform in order to deploy models to production.
• Collaborate with other data & applied scientists as well as distributed system engineer and program manager.
• Proactively seeks mentorship from others.

What This Job Offers

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