Principal ML Engineer

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

4d • $165,600 - $331,200

About The Position

Join Microsoft AI Experience’s Copilot Discover Engineering Team as a senior technical architect responsible for the technical direction and long-range architecture of Copilot Discover. The role owns end-to-end architectural vision, shapes an AI-forward discovery platform, and steers product experiences where users engage with knowledge, content, and personalization across Copilot surfaces.

Design and drive systems that power the Copilot Discover feed at scale. The platform ingests, enriches, ranks, personalizes, and serves content across web, mobile, and partner surfaces. Lead architectural strategy to unify signals, models, and data into coherent, trustworthy experiences; modernize ranking and personalization; and build infrastructure for intelligent, anticipatory, personalized discovery. Influence platform direction across teams and adjacent organizations while ensuring MSN and Copilot Discover systems are robust, scalable, privacy-respecting, and adaptable over the long term. Strong product sense is important to drive convergence across fragmented surfaces, reduce complexity, and shape a consistent platform model.

The role collaborates across Microsoft to build high-scale, AI-driven systems that combine architectural rigor with user value. Microsoft describes its mission as empowering every person and organization to achieve more, and its culture as grounded in growth mindset, innovation, collaboration, respect, integrity, accountability, and inclusion.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field and 8+ years of related experience, or a master’s degree in one of these fields and 6+ years, or a doctorate and 5+ years, or equivalent experience.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, including data pipelines, microservices, APIs, and storage systems.
• Experience with content platforms, personalization systems, or consumer-facing services at scale.
• Experience with technologies such as Apache Spark, Kafka, columnar storage, data modeling, and schema evolution.
• Demonstrated success as a technical lead or architect, influencing across teams without direct authority.
• Experience and understanding of system architecture, performance tuning, telemetry design, and operational excellence.
• Exposure to ML/AI systems, especially in content understanding, ranking, or personalization.
• Excellent analytical and communication skills, including the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly.
• Demonstrated cross-organizational collaboration skills and ability to influence senior stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field and 12+ years of related experience, or a doctorate in one of these fields and 8+ years, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for Copilot Discover platforms and set end-to-end architectural strategy.
• Partner with product, design, data science, and engineering leaders to translate business and user needs into executable architectural plans, documented designs, and multi-year roadmaps.
• Set and govern architectural decisions across multiple services and teams, ensuring systems are scalable, secure, reliable, cost-efficient, and grounded in data, telemetry, and operational excellence.
• Raise the technical bar across the organization by establishing falsifiable principles, reviewing critical designs, and helping develop technical leaders.
• Establish and evolve quality and reliability standards, including test strategies, CI/CD practices, monitoring, alerting, and live-site health.
• Shape adoption of AI/ML techniques for content understanding, personalization, summarization, and safety in collaboration with MAI and partner teams.
• Serve as a cross-organizational technical leader, aligning MSN architecture with Bing, Copilot, Ads, Privacy, Trust, and other Microsoft platforms.

What This Job Offers

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