Principal Applied Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Applied Scientist (AI): Leading the science behind ranking and content-quality combining LLMs, multimodal models, and large-scale recommender systems. Focus on safety and trust, translate user engagements and behavioral history into model objectives and product bets.

Location: Expected to work from the office at least four days per week within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S.

Salary: USD $139,900 – $304,200 per year.

Company

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

What you will do

• Lead content‑quality understanding at scale by designing and deploying models that assess credibility, usefulness, freshness, safety, and diversity across modalities.
• Advance the recommendation & ranking stack by architecting and productionizing large‑scale DNN/LLM‑enhanced recommenders.
• Own evaluation and experimentation, defining offline metrics and online methodologies to confidently attribute impact and guard against regressions.
• Champion safety & trust by partnering with policy and platform teams to encode safety standards and editorial principles into the ML system.
• Scale E2E ML systems by collaborating with engineering on data contracts, feature stores, and distributed training/inference.
• Mentor & influence peers through design reviews, deep‑dives, and principled decision-making.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience.
• OR Master’s Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience.
• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience.
• Experience with LLMs (prompting, finetuning, RAG), multimodal modeling, and retrieval‑augmented recommendation.
• Demonstrated ability to lead cross‑disciplinary efforts from idea to shipped impact; mentoring scientists and setting technical vision.

Nice to have

• Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years related experience in machine learning, deep learning or similar technologies.
• Publications at top AI/ML conferences (e.g., KDD, SIGIR, EMNLP, NIPS, ICML, ICLR, RecSys, ACL, CIKM, CVPR, ICCV, etc.).
• Familiarity with Microsoft stack (e.g., Azure ML, Kusto, Synapse, Azure AI Foundry).
• Experience working with recommender systems/ranking or content‑quality/safety models at consumer scale, with clear business impact.
• Experience in Python and at least one major deep learning framework (PyTorch/TensorFlow) with large‑scale data processing and training/inference on distributed systems.
• Experience in evaluation & experimentation (offline metrics, A/B testing, bandits) and ML model development lifecycle.

Culture & Benefits

• Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer.