Senior Applied Scientist

• Develop and improve AI models, prompting strategies, retrieval pipelines, and evaluation methods for Word Mobile and Word Copilot scenarios spanning document creation, authoring, comprehension, editing, and collaboration. 
• Design grounded experiences that use Work IQ signals—including documents, meetings, emails, chats, people, and organizational context—while respecting permissions, security, compliance, and responsible AI requirements. 
• Build mobile-first Copilot experiences for drafting, rewriting, summarizing, explaining, structuring, and refining content, while preserving the precision, trust, and rich document semantics expected from a world-class word processor. 
• Partner with engineering, product, and design teams across Word and Microsoft 365 to integrate, flight, monitor, and maintain models and agent capabilities across iOS, Android, web, and desktop surfaces, including features and dependencies that span teams and geographies. 
• Create rigorous offline and online evaluations for quality, grounding, safety, latency, reliability, and user satisfaction; investigate failures through solid problem-solving and debugging practices and translate findings into model and product improvements. 
• Use customer feedback, product telemetry, service monitoring, and experimentation results to identify emerging authoring needs, validate hypotheses, and prioritize high-impact improvements for Word and mobile workflows. 
• Communicate scientific insights clearly, contribute to design and architecture reviews, grow shared team knowledge, influence cross-functional decisions, and create reusable methods, publications, patents, or technical artifacts where appropriate. 

Required/Minimum 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.

Additional or preferred qualifications

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. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, machine learning, or applied research).
  • OR Master's Degree in a related field AND 7+ years related experience.
  • OR Doctorate in a related field AND 6+ years related experience.
  • OR equivalent experience. 
• Solid programming skills in Python and hands-on experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch. 
• Experience developing, adapting, or evaluating large language models, multimodal models, retrieval-augmented systems, or agentic AI applications. 
• Demonstrated success translating applied research into reliable production services, including experimentation, evaluation, debugging, and performance optimization. 
• Publication record or significant industry impact in natural language processing, multimodal AI, human-AI interaction, information retrieval, or machine learning. 
• Experience building grounded AI systems over enterprise or user-context data, including retrieval quality, citations, permission-aware access, safety, and responsible AI considerations. 
• Experience with mobile or cross-platform product constraints, online experimentation, telemetry analysis, and quality measurement for customer-facing AI experiences. 
• Solid collaboration and technical leadership skills, with a growth mindset, customer focus, and commitment to inclusive product development. 

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.