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.

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will define the future of AI in Microsoft - leading the design, development, and deployment of intelligent features that transform the way people collaborate worldwide. Beyond delivering groundbreaking AI experiences, you will set scientific vision for the team, mentor talent, and ensure our solutions exemplify rigor, responsibility, and ethical standards. In this role, you will operate at the intersection of research and product - applying state-of-the-art techniques to address real-world challenges on a global scale. You will collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to translate the latest advances in AI areas into reliable, high-impact user experiences.

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.

We are looking for brilliant, innovative scientist with a proven track record of building complex AI products, machine learning, and other advances, etc., who are passionate about serving as AI expert, in cope with diverse business requirements, open with changes and would like to work on some of the following:

• GPT, open source and Machine Learning
• Prompt Engineering and Architecture
• Fine-tune, adapt, and optimize pre-trained AI for domain-specific tasks while balancing performance, efficiency, and cost.
• Develop scalable pipelines for data collection, cleaning, augmentation, and evaluation.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate applied research into production-quality features.
• Define and track key performance metrics for AI features, including accuracy, latency, robustness, and user satisfaction.
• Stay current with advances in generative AI, multimodal, and applied ML techniques, and bring forward innovative ideas to improve our products.
• Search Algorithms and Architecture
• Pre-training
• Applied Statistics
• Information extraction

Responsibilities include but not limited to:

• Work with stakeholders to identify opportunities leveraging the data to drive business growth.
• Develop and deploy advanced Search, AI product, NLP and E2E solutions with the cutting-edge algorithms.
• Deep dive the insights driven by data and make well use of the metrices and statistics to show concise and accurate results easy to understand.
• Understand the Microsoft tech stack and deploy the engineering pipeline in support of the models developed.

• 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.
• Experience fine-tuning or instruction-tuning large foundation.
• Knowledge of prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or multi-agent systems.
• Familiarity with distributed training, optimization, and deployment in production systems.
• Track record of published work in ML/NLP conferences or journals.
• Experience working in cross-functional teams, shipping AI-powered features to users.
• Professional and hands-on coding skills in C#, Java, C++, Python, or other OO languages.
• Extensive experience in developing search algorithms, including ranker, indexing, matching, it is a plus to lead advanced software design, be familiar with the architecture of plugins.
• Deep understanding of the machine learning algorithms/math and the statistics behind. Capable of innovating algorithms to business areas that you had no experience before.
• Be adaptive and positive to the changes.
• Coding lover, hands-on coding experience in data science is a must.
• Self-motivated and can-do attitude! Demonstrated ability to own important areas of projects and execute successfully.
• Capable of solving unseen problems individually.
• Publication in top-tier conferences or journals is a plus.
• Effective communication skills, and great team and cross-group collaboration skills.
• Solid analytical and presentation skills.

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.