Senior Applied Scientist

IDEAS Research in Microsoft’s productivity division is hiring Senior Applied Scientists to help maximize the incredible potential of AI to facilitate the next generation of human productivity. IDEAS is the central data organization for Microsoft’s productivity division, and the research team works at the intersection of computer science, economics, and behavioral science. We bring together rigorous analytic science and technical innovation. Our scientists collaborate closely with people across Microsoft’s product teams and Microsoft Research to see their ideas realized in products and services like M365 Copilot and the broader M365 productivity application suite. We also contribute back to the scientific community through peer-reviewed publications at top venues, scientific presentations, and beyond. 

We are looking for Senior Applied Scientists who are intellectually creative, self-driven, curious, people-oriented and comfortable defining a path through ambiguity towards high-level goals. Strong applicants have demonstrated ability to create and drive a research agenda that pushes scientific and technological frontiers and that yields real-world value. Research areas of interest include but are not limited to reinforcement learning, agentic systems, multimodal AI, post-training techniques and their application, domain-specific large language model (LLM) applications, personalization, computational social science, agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI interpretability, AI alignment, collaborative AI, and the economics of 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. 

Required Qualifications:

• Doctorate (or currently pursuing) in Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, Information Science, Statistics, Economics or related field AND 1+ years of experience (any research assistantship, teaching assistantship, or internship is considered relevant experience) 
• A record of publications in top-tier scientific venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, KDD, WWW, CHI, PNAS, Nature, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, CoRL).

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.

• Proven real-world impact from your research, demonstrated through shipped products, improved user experiences, or other measurable benefits for diverse stakeholders.
• At least one internship or prior role at a leading technology company, or start-up, or related organizations.

• Defining, leading, and helping to conduct research projects that simultaneously advance the state-of-the-art and directly benefit Microsoft’s core productivity products.   
• Shaping strategy and product direction by integrating rigorous scientific methods into the product understanding and development 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.    
• 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.   
• Effectively 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 our culture and values