Senior Applied Scientist-Ads Monetization

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

2d • $119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

Microsoft Monetization is building AI-powered advertising and commerce experiences across Search, Audience, Shopping, Copilot, and emerging agentic surfaces. As conversational agents become a way for users to interact with businesses, the team is reimagining how products, services, and ads are discovered, selected, personalized, and delivered.

As part of the Microsoft AI Experiences Monetization team, the Senior Applied Scientist solves end-to-end machine learning and optimization problems across ads products. The role designs and implements machine learning models and algorithms for Microsoft Ads, Bing, Copilot, and other surfaces, addressing large-scale challenges in user understanding, ad representation, retrieval, recommendation, ranking, and optimization. It applies and advances NLP, computer vision, LLM, Generative AI, and Agentic AI technologies to deliver robust, scalable advertising solutions that improve user experiences and business outcomes for millions of users and advertisers.

AI Experiences employees who live within a 50-mile commute of a designated Microsoft Hub in the U.S. 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 Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field, and 4+ years of related experience; OR master's degree in one of these fields and 3+ years of related experience; OR doctorate in one of these fields and 1+ year of related experience; OR equivalent experience.
• Preferred education and experience: master's degree in a listed or related field and 6+ years of related experience; OR doctorate in a listed or related field and 3+ years of related experience; OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years developing natural language processing or multimodal machine learning systems using deep learning, including hands-on experience with transformer-based SLMs or LLMs, OR 4+ years of work experience in computer vision using modern deep learning technologies, including Vision Transformers.
• 4+ years developing and operating production machine learning or AI systems using Python, C++, or equivalent programming languages.
• Ability to work independently within a team to deliver innovative solutions to challenging business and technical problems, from high-level vision and architecture through design and implementation.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in online advertising.
• Experience with distributed training or inference for SLMs and LLMs, including data and model parallelism, mixed-precision training, checkpointing, experiment management, performance optimization, and efficient serving.
• Experience evaluating SLMs, LLMs, or agentic systems using task-specific offline metrics, human or model-assisted evaluation, safety and robustness testing, latency and cost analysis, and controlled online experiments.
• Experience designing and implementing agentic AI systems using tool calling, retrieval, planning, memory, structured outputs, multi-step workflows, or multi-agent coordination, with appropriate safeguards and observability.
• Experience applying responsible AI practices to model and agent development, including evaluation for safety, reliability, privacy, security, bias, groundedness, and misuse risks.
• Publications at peer-reviewed data science or AI conferences such as KDD, CIKM, SIGIR, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, ICCV, or ACL.

Responsibilities

• Define ad relevance problems across different advertising scenarios to optimize the experience for users and advertisers.
• Drive algorithmic and modeling improvements, primarily using deep learning techniques in NLP and computer vision, including the latest LLM models.
• Deploy robust and scalable solutions to continuously improve ad relevance.
• Analyze model and system performance and identify improvement opportunities through offline and online testing.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; further benefits and pay information is available through Microsoft's careers website.

What This Job Offers

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