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About the Role
Our team builds the search and grounding technology that finds the right information for each request across email, documents, meetings, chats and people, and connects AI-generated answers to the sources that support them. This work sits on the critical path: getting it right improves relevance, limits hallucinations and earns user trust. We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to help drive this work. You will take on hard, open-ended problems in search and grounding and own them end to end, from framing the problem and building the data through modeling, evaluation and deployment, while helping set the scientific direction for the team. The impact is broad: our work improves search in Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive and grounds the answers in Microsoft 365 Copilot, reaching tens of millions of people at work. The role spans science and engineering, so you can learn everything from writing production code to training the latest language models, and everything in between. People who thrive here love turning ambiguity into robust systems, balance machine learning and information retrieval fundamentals with production pragmatism, and care about user trust, performance and clarity of outcomes. 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
- Advance how AI systems search for information: understanding what a person needs, turning requests into precise queries, choosing where to look, and recognizing when enough evidence has been found.
- Improve the quality, coverage and reliability of grounding data, so answers are relevant, accurate and supported by the sources they cite.
- Train and fine-tune language models for search and grounding tasks, using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve both quality and speed.
- Design evaluation methods and reward signals that reflect what users value, such as relevance, accuracy, trustworthy citations and efficiency.
- Build training and evaluation data in privacy-preserving ways, including synthetic data generation.
- Define offline and online metrics for search and answer quality, and make sure offline gains predict what people experience in production.
- Dig into real-world failures, find root causes and turn them into model, data and system fixes that ship.
- Partner with engineering, product, ranking and research teams to take new techniques from experiment to production, across many languages and markets.
- Mentor scientists and engineers, raise the bar on experimental rigor, and communicate results and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
Requirements
- 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.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements.
- Must pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Skills
- Solid foundation in information retrieval and search, including query understanding, retrieval, ranking and relevance evaluation.
- Experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic search or other systems that ground language model outputs in external data.
- Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning language models, such as supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, and shipping the results to production.
- Experience designing evaluation metrics, test sets or model-based judges for search or answer quality.
- Solid experimentation skills, including statistical significance testing, A/B experiments and turning results into product decisions.
- Experience working with sensitive data under privacy constraints, including synthetic data generation.
- Proficiency in Python and modern machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, and experience working with large-scale data.
- A track record of publications, patents or equivalent applied impact, and the ability to explain complex results to technical and non-technical audiences.
Location
- U.S.
Work Type
- Full-time
Experience Level
- Senior
- Applied Sciences IC4
Education Level
- Bachelor's Degree
- Master's Degree
- Doctorate
Salary/Compensations
- USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year (U.S. typical base pay range)
- USD $160,200 - $261,000 per year (San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area)
Benefits
- Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
About the Company
- 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.
Equal Opportunity
- 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.