Senior Applied Scientist

Microsoft Copilot is revolutionizing how people work and has created an unprecedented opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in a way that benefits millions of people. As a Senior Applied Scientist on a multi-disciplinary team within a Design division, your core mission will be to deliver exciting innovation in Microsoft Copilot.

We are looking for candidates who are creative, self-driven, curious, people-oriented, and comfortable defining a path through ambiguity towards high-level goals. In this role, you will collaborate closely with people across Microsoft’s M365 product teams and Microsoft Research to see their ideas realized in products and services that are used worldwide, as well as to contribute back to the scientific community and beyond. Our immediate team works on the intersection between UX/UI design, UX engineering, engineering, UX research, and product strategy/marketing.  

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 4+ 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 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience.
• A record of publication in top-tier scientific venues, including, but not limited to Association of Computing Linguistics, Conference on Human Interactions (CHI).
• Experience coding and hands-on experience working with foundation models, including, but not limited to creating end-to-end workflows for experimentation and analyzing results. 
• Domain expertise in Natural Language Processing, with demonstrated experience in wrangling text and structured/unstructured data to find insights that can translate into actionable business outcomes. 
• Ability to apply research and new ideas to product UX. 
• Proficiency in coding in at least two languages such as Python, C#, Java, etc. 
• Demonstrated collaboration and communication skills, both within-team and cross-team, and experience working through problems in ambiguous environments. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Master'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 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.
• 3+ years experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers).
• Experience working on successful applied research projects in industry environments. 
• Record of publication specifically on applications of language models or very closely related areas, with demonstrated interest and experience in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. With additional experience in developing user study plans, generating hypothesis, utilizing state of the art methods to understand human behavior.
• Experience in frameworks such as Python (Flask), C# (.NET), Java (Spring/Spring Boot), and JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js) or similar technologies 
• A strong understanding of the data layer, including expertise in SQL and NoSQL databases, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for managing large-scale data, or similar  
• Experience with: 
  • Applications of Foundation Models  
  • Experience with Transformer Models 
  • Domain Adaptation of Foundation Models (e.g. fine-tuning LLMs/SLMs)  
  • Vision, Audio, and Multimodal Foundation Models  
  • On-device Foundation Models  
  • Agentic Systems  
  • Prompt Tuning  
  • Prompt Engineering 
  • Applied Machine Learning  
  • Data Mining with Language Models  
  • Human-AI Interaction 
  • Computational Social Science 
  • Data Visualization 

Applied Sciences IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $158,400 - $258,000 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

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until July 3, 2025.

#JoinX3 

• Defining, leading, and conducting research projects that simultaneously advance the state-of-the-art and directly benefit Microsoft’s core productivity products, especially with a focus on UX. 
• 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 mentoring colleagues in state-of-the-art techniques and research best practices. 
• Learning from experience and iterating on new hypotheses and unexpected outcomes. 
• Sharing research via publications and other means to enable others to build on your work and contribute to the understanding of our products as cutting-edge and science-driven. 
• Effectively communicating with product leaders and researchers throughout the planning and execution of applied research projects.