Machine Learning Senior Researcher

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The PROSE team is advancing the state of the art in program synthesis and shipping these innovations through flagship Microsoft products that impact millions of users worldwide. These products include the world’s most popular spreadsheet software Excel, the industry-leading IDEs Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, the Power Platform suite of products including Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate, and other software tools including Azure Data Studio, Azure Data Monitor, Azure Data Factory, PowerShell, and SQL Server Management Studio. The application domains range from developer productivity, business user low-code/no-code scenarios to even programming education. To power these features PROSE has developed a powerful and flexible framework for program synthesis that leverages techniques from both logical reasoning and machine learning (including LLMs) and combines them in unique ways to synthesize programs automatically. This approach has been recognized with frequent papers at top-tier conferences and awards, including best paper and test-of-time awards.

We invite machine learning researchers to apply for a full-time position on the PROSE team at Microsoft. The recent success of large language models (LLMs) creates an opportunity to take a qualitative step forward, to extend dramatically the reach of what users can do with Copilot. Our team provides a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and real-world impact, solving customer problems on a global scale. Researchers design and carry out the research underlying state-of-the-art systems and work together with world-class engineers to implement these systems in production. To learn more about our approach and culture see this award talk on the story behind one of the team’s early innovations: the Flash Fill feature in Excel.

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.

Required Qualifications

• Doctorate in Computer Science or relevant field
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ publications in top-tier machine learning or artificial intelligence (such as AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP, ACL, and comparable).
• Experience in training transformer-based models, including data collection and curation, for research projects in both industrial and academic settings.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with large language models.
• Demonstrated proficiency in building interactive AI systems.
• Demonstrated interest in applying machine learning to spreadsheet tasks.
• Experience in industrial research internships.
• Demonstrated collaboration and communication skills in multi-disciplinary or cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated ability to develop an original research agenda, demonstrated by leading publications in a top-tier machine learning, or artificial intelligence conference.

Background Check Requirements:

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.

• Design and carry out innovative AI research on Excel
• Work with engineers and PMs to deploy your research to customers.
• Collaborate with academic partners, mentor interns and longer-term research fellows.
• Publish in top-tier academic venues and interact with the broader academic community.