Chercheur principal / Principal Researcher

Microsoft • Montreal, QC

2d • $142,400 - $257,500

About The Position

The Microsoft Applied Sciences Group designs and develops disruptive technologies for Microsoft's next-generation hardware products. It works on several exciting projects that will shape how computers and other devices perceive the user and their environment. This team collaborates closely with several research and product teams to bring compelling new experiences to the market. Many of these experiences are powered by machine learning – and within this team, you will have the unique opportunity to work on almost every aspect of a machine learning project, from ideation to production. You will have the opportunity to turn ideas into concrete solutions with real-world impact at Microsoft scale.
As Principal Researcher, you will have the opportunity to design and lead the implementation of state-of-the-art language and multimodal models to transform products and experiences at Microsoft scale. You will collaborate with recognized experts in their field from across the organization and see your ideas turn into reality with real-world impact.
Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we embrace a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to achieve our common goals. Every day, we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create an inclusive culture where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Requirements

• Doctorate in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 4+ years related research experience OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 6+ years related research experience 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

• 3+ years' experience training and/or finetuning large language & multimodal models and distillation to small models.
• 3+ years' experience with Python and deep learning libraries
• Demonstrated record of publications in top-tier conferences or journals (ICLR, ACL, EMLP, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, TPAMI, etc.).
• Experience in creating reusable software libraries and packages.
• Experience using dataset curation, data generation using prompting state of art LLMs and/or model alignment.
• Experience with reinforcement learning libraries or formal methods and verification is a plus.
• Demonstrated ability and passion for incubating new ideas, solving problems, and building working systems.

Responsibilities

• Research focusing on foundation models – Designing and training language and multimodal models (and finetunes) with supervised finetuning, distillation, reinforcement learning, low-rank adaptation.
• Research focusing on environment interaction, policy specification and verification and human intent alignment.
• Implementation: Train, distill, and finetune language and vision models in PyTorch, DeepSpeed, AzureML stack.
• Designing novel model architectures geared towards efficient inference while maintaining quality.
• Data science - Research and develop synthetic data generation strategies.
• Proactively follow state of the art research and share latest work, write papers, attend conferences and share knowledge in the wider team.

What This Job Offers

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