Senior Researcher, Office Product Group

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

3d•$119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

We are building a high-impact AI engineering and applied science team within the Office Product Group to advance the next generation of intelligent, AI-powered experiences embedded directly into Microsoft 365 applications. The team operates at the intersection of research and product development, evolving new model and system capabilities and delivering them at scale to support hundreds of millions of users worldwide. As an Senior Researcher, you will contribute to the design, development, evaluation, and deployment of AI systems that can reason, take action, and work across tools, documents, and services. You will apply these capabilities within real product environments, balancing innovation with practical considerations such as reliability, performance, and user experience. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We approach our work with a growth mindset, collaborate across teams to deliver meaningful outcomes, and continuously learn and innovate to better serve our customers. Our culture is grounded in respect, integrity, and accountability, creating an inclusive environment where individuals and teams can do their best work.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

Doctorate in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 6+ years related research experience OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 8+ years related research experience OR equivalent experience.
Experience contributing to research initiatives, including authorship or meaningful contributions to academic publications.
Experience engaging with the research community through participation in conferences, workshops, or similar forums within a relevant domain.
Familiarity with evaluation methods for generative and agent-based systems, including offline benchmarking and online experimentation approaches.
Experience working with large language models and agent-based systems, including prompt design, tool integration, contextual memory, and system orchestration.
Experience applying fine-tuning and post-training techniques to large-scale models, including supervised fine-tuning, preference-based methods, reward modeling, or reinforcement learning approaches.
Experience collaborating across research and engineering teams to support the transition of solutions from prototype to production scenarios.
Communication and collaboration skills with experience contributing to cross-functional work, navigating ambiguity, and supporting end-to-end problem solving.

Responsibilities

Support the development of frameworks that enable coordination and communication across multiple AI components, helping to facilitate task delegation, orchestration, and result validation scenarios.
Apply and improve techniques for efficient code generation and transformation in low-resource environments, including adapting models to domain-specific languages, formulas, and structured or semi-structured data formats.
Implement and iterate on fine-tuning and post-training approaches for large-scale machine learning models to enhance reliability, controllability, and readiness for production use.
Contribute to the design and execution of evaluation strategies and benchmarks that reflect real-world Microsoft 365 user workflows, including participation in system-level and human-in-the-loop assessments.
Collaborate with engineering and product management partners to help translate research ideas into scalable, production-ready features, with attention to user experience, performance, and responsible AI practices.