We are looking for a Principal Applied Scientist who is creative, self-driven, curious, people-oriented and comfortable defining a path through ambiguity towards high-level goals. This role is ideal for candidates passionate about building real-world systems that unify different textual modalities and agentic experiences to power next-generation user experiences across devices and platforms.

As a senior member of the team, you will be a tech lead and drive innovation across model architectures, training, and deployment. You will play a key role in converting cutting-edge research into practical applications and experiences for users across the globe by proven skills in product experiences: understanding requirements, setting partner expectations and communicating across team boundaries.

Research areas of interest include but are certainly not limited to reinforcement learning, agentic systems multimodal modeling, post-training techniques and their application, human-centered artificial intelligence (AI), domain-specific large language model (LLM) applications (e.g. long-form writing assistance), personalization, computational social science, memory, agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), real-time AI systems, collaborative AI, privacy-preserving AI, trustworthy AI, data-centric AI, AI flywheels, and multilingual 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.
About the team:
The Microsoft Applied Sciences Group incubates disruptive technologies for Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices organization. We are working on groundbreaking technologies that shape how we will interact and communicate with computers, each other and our environment. Operating as a startup within the company, our team works closely with several research and product teams to bring compelling new experiences to the market. A lot of these experiences will be powered by machine learning – and as part of this team, you will be uniquely positioned to bring latest research to life in products that are used by hundreds of millions of people.
https://www.microsoft.com/applied-sciences/