Senior Applied Scientist

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

7h • $119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

The Senior Applied Scientist will work on Microsoft’s Copilot Agents & Search Quality team, which develops machine-learning solutions for Microsoft products, including M365 Copilot and Search. The role focuses on modernizing the search stack for agentic and traditional search experiences, advancing enterprise search algorithms, and improving sparse, dense, and multimodal retrieval using large language models and other machine-learning techniques.

The scientist will collaborate with research, product, engineering, and platform teams to develop, evaluate, and deploy retrieval solutions at scale. The work includes defining retrieval quality, analyzing model behavior and experiments, balancing relevance with latency and efficiency, and iterating on deployed systems. The role also provides scientific leadership, mentorship, documentation, and contributions to publications or intellectual property where appropriate.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field and 4+ years of related experience; or a master’s degree in one of these fields and 3+ years of related experience; or a doctorate in one of these fields and 1+ year of related experience; or equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field and 6+ years of related experience; or a doctorate in one of these fields and 3+ years of related experience; or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of experience creating publications, such as patents, libraries, or peer-reviewed academic papers.
• Experience presenting as an invited speaker at conferences or other events in the outside research or industry community.
• 3+ years of experience conducting research as part of an academic or industry research program.
• 1+ year of experience developing and deploying live production systems as part of a product team.
• 1+ year of experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle, from ideation to shipping.
• Experience with agentic search, including query planning, iterative retrieval, evidence selection, and evaluating the quality and efficiency of grounded responses.
• Experience applying machine learning to information retrieval, search relevance, or related retrieval problems.
• Experience shipping and evaluating deep-learning models in production at scale, including diagnosing quality or performance regressions.
• Solid programming skills in Python and experience with a modern deep-learning framework such as PyTorch.
• Experience designing offline evaluations and interpreting online experiments to make product decisions.
• Ability to lead an ambiguous technical problem and collaborate with engineering and product teams to deliver a solution.

Responsibilities

• Lead applied research to improve retrieval quality for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Copilot Search, Work IQ, and agent experiences.
• Evaluate advances in information retrieval, NLP, and large language models, and adapt promising approaches to enterprise data and product needs.
• Modernize search for agentic and traditional entry points by developing and improving sparse and dense retrieval methods, enterprise-adapted models, and query-understanding techniques.
• Partner with engineering and platform teams to bring effective approaches into production at scale.
• Define and measure retrieval quality using representative datasets, offline evaluation, statistical analysis, and production experiments.
• Identify quality gaps, test hypotheses, understand model behavior, and communicate findings that guide product decisions.
• Own research-backed solutions from problem formulation through deployment; balance relevance, latency, and efficiency; monitor deployed models and iterate as results or data change.
• Partner with product, engineering, and research teams to shape priorities and share practical advances.
• Mentor less experienced scientists, document methods and findings, and contribute to publications or intellectual property where appropriate.

What This Job Offers

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