Senior Applied Scientist Senior Applied Scientist

• Owns the science roadmap for grounding—including retrieval, re-ranking, attribution, and reasoning—driving initiatives from problem framing to production impact. Designs and evolves state-of-the-art retrieval and RAG orchestration across documents, tables, code, and images.
• Builds citation and provenance systems (e.g., passage highlighting, quote-level alignment, confidence scoring) to reduce hallucinations and increase user trust. Leads experimentation and evaluation using A/B testing, interleaving, NDCG, MRR, precision/recall, and calibration curves to guide measurable trade-offs.
• Advances tool-augmented grounding through schema-aware retrieval, function calling, knowledge graph joins, and real-time connectors to databases, cloud object stores, search indexes, and the web. Partners with platform engineering to productionize models with scalable inference, embedding services, feature stores, caching, and privacy-compliant multi-tenant systems.
• Nurtures collaborative relationships with product and business leaders across Microsoft, influencing strategic decisions and driving business impact through technology. Authors white papers, contributes to internal tools and services, and may publish research to generate intellectual property.
• Bridges the gap between researchers (e.g., Microsoft Research) and development teams, applying long-term research to solve immediate product needs. Leads high-stakes negotiations to ensure cutting-edge technologies are applied practically and effectively.
• Identifies and solves significant business problems using novel, scalable, and data-driven solutions. Shapes the direction of Microsoft and the broader industry through pioneering product and tooling work.
• Mentors applied scientists and data scientists, establishing best practices in experimentation, error analysis, and incident review. Collaborates cross-functionally with PMs, research, infrastructure, and security teams to align on milestones, SLAs, and safety protocols.
• Communicates clearly through design documentation, progress updates, and presentations to executives and customers. Contributes to ethics and privacy policies, identifies bias in product development, and proposes mitigation strategies.

• 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.

• 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.
• Demonstrated expertise in information retrieval, with publications in top-tier conferences or journals such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, SIGIR, or ACL.
• Hands-on experience in Advanced AI Technology development, including pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL).
• Proven track record in optimizing LLM inference, or active contributions to open-source frameworks like vLLM, SGLang, or related projects.
• Minimum of 4 years of hands-on experience designing and building search, retrieval, or ranking systems.
• Proven track record of shipping Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems into production environments.
• Solid coding skills and solid foundation in machine learning, with the ability to implement and optimize models effectively.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through ambiguity, make principled trade-offs, and deliver measurable impact in cross-functional, fast-paced settings.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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.