Job Description

AI has created an unprecedented opportunity to make work better for hundreds of millions of people. Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork that integrates the people, content, and tools your team needs to be more engaged and effective. It is at the core of Microsoft’s modern work, life, and education value proposition. We are reinventing the way people communicate and work together across the globe. We are hiring a Principal Applied Scientist to help ensure we maximize this amazing opportunity.

We are looking for a Principal Applied Scientist who is creative, self-driven, curious, people-oriented, and comfortable defining a path through ambiguity toward high-level goals. Research areas of interest include but are certainly not limited to reinforcement learning, agentic systems multimodal modeling, post-training techniques and their application, human-centered artificial intelligence (AI), domain-specific large language model (LLM) applications (e.g. long-form writing assistance), personalization, computational social science, memory, agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), real-time AI systems, collaborative AI, privacy-preserving AI, trustworthy AI, data-centric AI, AI flywheels, and multilingual AI.

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.

Responsibilities

• Defining, leading, and helping to conduct research projects that simultaneously advance the state-of-the-art and directly benefit Microsoft’s core productivity products.  
• Shape product direction by integrating rigorous scientific methods into the product lifecycle.
• Collaborating and coordinating with people in a range of roles, including researchers, engineers, product managers, designers, and other key product stakeholders. Serving as a bridge between research and product.   
• Teaching, guiding, and tutoring colleagues without research backgrounds in state-of-the-art techniques and research best practices.  
• Sharing your research with others via a range of means, including publication, to enable others to build on your work and to contribute to the understanding of our products as cutting-edge and science driven.  
• Communicating with product leaders (and often Microsoft researchers – MSR) throughout the planning and execution of applied research projects, which often involves learning and teaching complex concepts.
• Embody the Microsoft culture and values 

Qualifications

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.

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.
• Publications in scientific venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, KDD, WWW, CHI, PNAS, Nature, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL).
• 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.
• 5+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
• 3+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team.
• 3+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.
• Demonstrated impact from your research through shipped products, improved user experiences, or other measurable benefits for diverse stakeholders.
• Demonstrated interest for continuous learning and innovation in AI.
• Demonstrated technical leadership or mentor experience (influencing technical direction, guiding team members).

Applied Sciences IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.