Principal Applied Scientist

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Our team is responsible for the core systems that power Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat delivering intelligence, quality, and transformative new features. We work at the intersection of research and engineering—advancing orchestrator reasoning, training next-generation models, and shipping impactful, model-driven experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will:

• Evolve our orchestrator to reason more effectively, respond faster, and support new capabilities in multi-modality, agent-based systems, and beyond
• Advance the state of the art in model training—including post-training methods such as fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, high-quality data curation, and experimentation with frontier model training
• Build and deliver model-driven features from concept to production—spanning model development, evaluation, metrics, and A/B testing

Recent launches like Analyst Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot showcase the breadth and depth of impact you’ll drive across the stack.

We’re hiring applied scientists who are passionate about deep learning, NLP (natural language processing), multimodality model, and model optimization. Come build the next generation of AI with us.

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:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience.

• 4+ years of experience with end-to-end in a challenging technical problem domain (plan, design, execution, continuous release, and service operation).
• 4+ years experience with shipping internet scale, low latency and high throughput systems AI products.
• 4+ years experience with customer/End-result/Metrics driven in design and development.

Other 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.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 5+ years experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers).
• 2+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
• Publications at top conferences like ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing), SIGKDD (Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining), AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining), COLING (International Conference on Computational Linguistics), WWW (World Wide Web Conference), NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), ICASSP (International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing), etc.

#msturingjobs #msai #M365CORE

• You will master a broad area or research and understand any applicable research techniques. You’ll also serve as a team expert on changes in industry trends, products, and other advances, and apply this knowledge to influence product needs.
• You will review business and product requirement, incorporate research, and provide strategic direction for problem solving.
• You’ll also ensure scientific rigor, support the development of methods, and apply your expertise to support business impact.
• You will identify and inspire peers and new research talent to join Microsoft, build relationships, and advocate for research initiatives. You’ll share research findings through industry outreach, collaborate with the academic community, and help develop the recruiting pipeline.
• You will document work and experimentation results and share findings to promote innovation. You’ll provide guidance when capturing processes and contribute to ethics and privacy policies related to research processes and data collection.