Senior Applied Scientist / Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft

10h • Remote

About The Position

We are hiring multiple Senior Applied Scientists and Principal Applied Scientists to join the Microsoft 365 team. These are remote positions, allowing you to work from the comfort of your home!
The Microsoft 365 team is looking for applied scientists to help design and build one of the fastest-growing cloud services at Microsoft.
As part of our team, you will help shape one of Microsoft’s fastest-growing cloud services. Your work will directly impact Copilot, enabling personalized, context-aware experiences that empower millions of users across Microsoft 365.
We build and operate the largest enterprise cloud productivity system in the world. Across products such as Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint, we power communication, sharing, search, intelligent assistance, extensibility through Microsoft Graph, and more. We maintain high reliability and availability, strong privacy and compliance, and millisecond-level latency. Our work combines approaches from API design, machine learning, distributed computing, workflow engines, algorithm optimization, and more. Join us to define, design, and deliver what enterprise cloud productivity means.
AI has created an unprecedented opportunity to make work better for hundreds of millions of people. We are looking for Senior Applied Scientists and Principal Applied Scientists who are creative, self-driven, curious, people-oriented and comfortable defining a path through ambiguity towards high-level goals. Research areas of interest include but are certainly not limited to reinforcement learning, agentic systems multimodal modeling, post-training techniques and their application, human-centered artificial intelligence (AI), domain-specific large language model (LLM) applications (e.g. long-form writing assistance), personalization, computational social science, memory, agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), real-time AI systems, collaborative AI, privacy-preserving AI, trustworthy AI, data-centric AI, AI flywheels, and multilingual AI.

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.
By applying to this position, you will be considered for multiple similar positions within our organization for an invitation-only virtual interview day. Position specifics, including hiring team, location, and position details, will be determined following the interview process.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or related field.
• OR equivalent experience in lieu of academic degrees.
• At least 5 years of experience in predictive analytics, statistics, or research.
• Experience with synthetic data generation and data management for evaluation/training.
• At least one year of experience publishing patents or peer-reviewed papers.
• Proficiency in English and cross-functional collaboration.
• Deep motivation for user-centric AI and interest in human cognition, memory, and AI.

Responsibilities

• Develop and evaluate ML models using prepared datasets, customer feedback, and novel training/fine-tuning algorithms for language models.
• Write production-quality code, apply debugging best practices, and stay current with industry trends.
• Defining, leading, and helping to conduct research projects that simultaneously advance the state-of-the-art and directly benefit Microsoft’s core productivity products.
• Shape product direction by integrating rigorous scientific methods into the product lifecycle.
• Collaborating and coordinating with people in a range of roles, including researchers, engineers, product managers, designers, and other key product stakeholders. Serving as a bridge between research and product.
• Teaching, guiding, and tutoring colleagues without research backgrounds in state-of-the-art techniques and research best practices.
• Sharing your research with others via a range of means, including publication, to enable others to build on your work and to contribute to the understanding of our products as cutting-edge and science driven.
• Effectively communicating with product leaders (and often Microsoft researchers (MSR)) throughout the planning and execution of applied research projects, which often involves learning and teaching complex concepts.

What This Job Offers

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