Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

Viva Engage connects people through communities, bringing leaders and employees together to share knowledge, clarify priorities, build culture and relationships. Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) is the premier tool to create multi-directional dialogue between tens of millions of employees worldwide every month. Engage team members are at the forefront of driving AI applications and copilot adoption to make communication and information sharing easy and authentic. Our work supports top challenges for our customers, spreading shared knowledge, including digital safety, trusted security standards, and deep analytics to help our customers maximize reach, reduce inefficiencies, and create a thriving organizational culture. We would love to have you join the team driving innovation, connection, and community for our valued global customers. #VivaEngage About this Job As a Principal Applied Scientist at Viva Engage, your role is to build Agentic applications across our product, predictive models that connect individuals with each other and knowledge across organizations. Our focus lies in discovery, recommendations, relevance and grounding for features across Viva Engage, leveraging data from our platform and across Office 365. What makes this role special? This role presents an opportunity to create a vision around the Viva Engage Agentic Applications, the underlying platform and help us make it a reality. Our tight-knit, high-performing team, coupled with the unique challenges posed by social enterprise analytics, will offer plenty of opportunities for impact. 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 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.
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:
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

Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR equivalent experience.
5+ years experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers).
2+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
5+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
3+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team.
3+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and ship machine learning and LLM-driven capabilities that directly power AI features in Viva Engage, with clear product KPIs (e.g., activation, retention, engagement, moderation quality, time saved).
Own end-to-end delivery of applied science solutions: problem framing → data/labels → modeling/prompting → evaluation → experimentation (A/B tests) → deployment → monitoring → iteration.
Develop and operationalize AI agents for knowledge discovery, moderation, communities, and events—focused on measurable user value, automation, and high-quality recommendations.
Work with large, complex datasets to solve ambiguous, non-routine product problems using advanced statistical and ML methods, prioritizing approaches that are production-viable.
Utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) for advanced text analysis and natural language understanding tasks, enabling deeper connections and knowledge sharing across organizations.
Leverage generative AI techniques to enhance data augmentation and predictive capabilities, further improving recommendations and personalized user experiences.
Develop deep product intuition to influence future product roadmaps and drive decision-making by making pragmatic tradeoffcs between model quality, engineering complexity, and time-to-value.
Collaborate with product and engineering to craft experiments and test hypotheses.
Communicate clearly across disciplines: translate complex technical decisions into product implications, risks, and expected outcomes.
Operate effectively in complex, cross-team environments and drive alignment through technical leadership and execution.