Principal Applied Scientist

Overview

Join a pioneering team transforming organizational collaboration with AI-driven Meeting Intelligence within Copilot. Daily, countless meetings produce valuable decisions, insights, and commitments that propel companies ahead. Our goal is to convert these interactions into actionable intelligence aiding preparation, alignment, decision-making speed, and confident execution.

As a Principal Data Scientist, you will spearhead innovative breakthroughs in Meeting Intelligence, shaping enterprise workflows enhanced by AI. You will lead the scientific vision behind next-gen capabilities that comprehend conversations, extract significant insights, surface pertinent details, and empower users to achieve more throughout their day.

This role works at the crossroads of Large Language Models (LLMs), Enterprise Grounding & Graph technologies, Conversational AI, and Applied Machine Learning. You will collaborate closely with Engineering, Product Management, Design, and Research teams to deliver cutting-edge AI experiences to millions globally.

This opportunity enables you to influence the evolution of workplace productivity, establish novel quality and evaluation benchmarks for AI experiences, and advance state-of-the-art understanding in meeting analytics, conversational intelligence, and collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Lead machine learning and AI solution development for Copilot's Meeting Intelligence.
• Design evaluation approaches, quality metrics, and measurement frameworks for AI-enhanced meeting features.
• Develop scientific methods to assess relevance, accuracy, grounding, consistency, trustworthiness, and user value.
• Steer experimentation plans and data-driven decisions via online/offline assessments.
• Drive product strategy by analyzing user behavior, outcomes, and AI quality indicators.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Design, Research, and Responsible AI teams to launch innovations.
• Enhance natural language understanding, retrieval, reasoning, and contextual intelligence methodologies to boost user experience.
• Mentor senior scientists and establish best practices for machine learning experiments, measurement science, and AI quality evaluation.
• Coordinate scientific priorities, evaluation standards, and investment in AI quality across organizations.
• Represent Microsoft via publications, patents, technical reviews, and industry involvement.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in relevant technical fields with 6+ years’ relevant experience; or Master’s degree with 4+ years; or Doctorate with 3+ years; or equivalent experience.
• Expertise in LLMs, NLP, Information Retrieval, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Conversational AI, Knowledge Representation, and Machine Learning for productivity-focused language applications.
• Strong background in experimentation, causal inference, statistical analysis, and measurement science.
• Proven experience developing and assessing AI-based products in production environments.
• Proficient in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience with large-scale cloud AI services and distributed systems.

Other Requirements

• Must pass Microsoft Cloud background checks at hiring and biennially thereafter per security policies.

Preferred Qualifications

• 9+ years in data science, applied machine learning, or AI with proven product impact via large-scale AI/ML systems.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks for generative AI and AI-agent assisted user experiences.
• Background in conversational systems, speech and language tech, or human-AI interaction.
• Publications at top-tier AI conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, WWW, SIGIR) and recognized patents or industry innovations.
• Leadership experience managing cross-disciplinary scientific initiatives.

Additional Information

This position remains open for a minimum of five days, with applications accepted continuously until filled.

Microsoft is committed to equal opportunity employment, considering all qualified applicants without discrimination. Reasonable accommodations are available during the application process upon request.