About the role

Aplyr's Quick Take

This role is for a Principal Applied Scientist focused on advancing knowledge retrieval systems at Microsoft. You'll be developing AI-driven solutions to improve search capabilities, working with large datasets and complex queries, and collaborating with various teams across the company. It's a hands-on, individual contributor position that requires strong technical skills in AI and machine learning.

Good fit

Ideal candidates are experienced data scientists or AI researchers with a solid background in machine learning and natural language processing. You should be comfortable working in a collaborative environment and have a passion for pushing the boundaries of AI technology.

Worth noting

The role emphasizes cutting-edge AI research and offers the chance to work on high-impact projects that directly affect enterprise customers. However, the spec is vague on day-to-day responsibilities, which might require clarification during the interview process.

Overview

Microsoft’s Enterprise customers have a challenge – they need the tools to build agentic experiences over public and private knowledge. The Azure AI Knowledge team is leading the way to deliver the next chapter of agentic retrieval through Foundry IQ Knowledge bases to bring together many sources of structured and unstructured enterprise data and transform it into knowledge. We are continuously developing and deploying new capabilities to meet the demands of complex queries that require reasoning and reflection to deliver high quality results. Our customers span many different industries, corpus sizes and scenarios, and our work includes multiple aspects, such as:

Developing LLM prompts, agents and query execution workflows, often with tight latency constraints

Collection, generation and filtering of training and evaluation data

Building off state of the art techniques from across Microsoft and the industry

Use of AI coding patterns to parallelize and accelerate experimentation

You can follow our progression from better search, to RAG, to agentic retrieval:

Azure AI Search: Outperforming vector search with hybrid retrieval and ranking capabilities – Microsoft Community Hub

Raising the bar for RAG excellence: introducing generative query rewriting and new ranking model

Up to 40% better relevance for complex queries with new agentic retrieval engine

Foundry IQ: boost response relevance by 36% with agentic retrieval | Microsoft Community Hub

As a team, we leverage the diverse backgrounds and experiences of passionate engineers, scientists, and program managers to help us realize our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We believe great products are built by inclusive teams of customer-obsessed individuals who trust each other and work closely together.  We collaborate regularly across the company with teams like M365, Bing and Microsoft Research.

A major aspect of this role is to push our development of knowledge retrieval to the frontier. This requires a capable individual who can leverage multiple coding agents to explore new techniques (autoresearch, claws, CLI systems, etc) and bring them to production at scale.

If you are passionate about working on the latest and hottest areas in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and data science, all the while making search better for customers across the world, then this is the team you’re looking for!

Responsibilities

Lead state-of-the-art research incorporation into techniques shipped to production
Proactively develop and build metrics to use across the full range of search engine components
Seek out and incorporate customer feedback into dataset construction, evaluation, and technique development
Lead technical excellence and contribute to experimentation infrastructure and proofs-of-concept using AI coding agents
Advance the quality of the team’s experimental codebase to ensure experiments are efficient and repeatable
Nurture collaborative relationships with product management, engineers, and other functions across products
Drive clear and efficient plans, documentation, and communication

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 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 years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.

Experience developing and deploying machine learning products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.

Experience with agentic coding systems, including scaffolding for long‑running agents.

Strong hybrid collaboration skills, with clear async/sync communication and teamwork.

Experience defining task‑specific metrics and evaluation datasets.

Customer‑focused and execution‑driven, with strong ownership and bias for action.

Strong problem‑solver, comfortable with novel, open‑ended problems.

#AIPLATFORM#

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.

Aplyr's read

Microsoft is a technology giant shaping global computing, attracting talent interested in innovation and impact across software, cloud, and AI sectors.
Synthesized from recent postings & public sources

What's promising

•Strong commitment to innovation in AI and cloud computing.
•Diverse range of roles from technical to managerial, offering career growth.
•Financially stable with a robust global presence and market influence.

What to watch

•Complex organizational structure can slow decision-making processes.
•High competition for roles may limit entry-level opportunities.
•Potential for work-life balance challenges in high-demand positions.

Why Microsoft

•Pioneer in personal and business computing with a legacy of innovation.
•Extensive global reach with a diverse workforce and inclusive culture.
•Leader in integrating AI into mainstream software and cloud services.

Aplyr’s read is generated by AI from public sources. Was it useful?

About Microsoft

Microsoft

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MSFT$390.34-1.77%

Microsoft is a global technology company that develops, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products, services, and devices. Known for its Windows operating system and Office productivity suite, Microsoft has a significant impact on personal and business computing worldwide.