Senior Applied Scientist, Microsoft AI

The Core Search and AI team is the leading applied machine learning team at Microsoft responsible for delivering the highest-quality search experience to over 500M+ monthly active users around the world in Microsoft’s search engine, Bing and other dependent search engines such as Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and new startups like Neeva. We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist, Microsoft AI to join us. 

We have seen little innovation in search in the last decade and we are looking for people who want to build the next generation of search using advanced AI technologies at scale. We are responsible for the largest machine learning models at Microsoft by volume and take pride in being the first in the world to solve many practical AI at Scale challenges. Our work spans a very large scope of scenarios including delivering high quality search results from a massive document corpus, extractive and abstractive summarization to generate document snippets, personalization, machine reading comprehension, and document recommendations.

As a team, we leverage the diverse backgrounds and experiences of passionate engineers, scientists, and program managers to help us realize our goal of making the world smarter and more productive. We believe great products are built by inclusive teams of customer-obsessed individuals who trust each other and work together closely.  We collaborate regularly across the company both to find the technology breakthroughs from groups like Microsoft Research to infusing AI into the rest of Microsoft products like Office and Azure.
Some examples of our work include:

• Building the LLM based Deep Search that even more relevant and comprehensive answers to the most complex search queries.
• Developing a massive sparse neural network to improve search relevance (covered by SiliconAngle, Search Engine Land, Venture Beat)
• Building the world’s most comprehensive spelling correction system through zero shot learning (covered by NextWeb, Venture Beat, and ZDNet)
• Using transformer networks for search (covered in Search Engine Land and in State of AI 2020 report)
• Launching our technology as a cloud service on Azure (a summary of the technologies we used)
• Delivering on innovative page summarization experiences (covered on Search Engine Land and onMSFT)
• Open sourcing our vector search algorithm (covered by Ars Technica and TechCrunch)
• Building and open sourcing blazing fast transformer network inferencing (covered in ZDNet and Forbes) Deep learning based question answering and captions (covered in VentureBeat, Search Engine Land)
• including developing our own accelerated chips for inferencing
• Co-developing our large scale training library called DeepSpeed (covered in SiliconAngle, The Batch)

If you are passionate about working on the latest and hottest areas that will help you develop skills in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, data science and high scale systems, this is the team you’re looking for! 

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.

Responsibilities

• Advance the state-of-the-art machine learning and NLP algorithms for real-world large-scale search and recommendation systems and applications.
• Work on the full lifecycle of machine learning development including training data collection, feature engineering, model training, offline and online experimentation, and deployment.
• Mentor and grow engineers in the team.

Qualifications

Required 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.
• 4+ years of industry experience applying Machine Learning techniques.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building large scale cloud-based solutions.
  
• Customer focused, strategic, drives for results, is self-motivated, and has a propensity for action.

Applied Sciences IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $117,200 - $229,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $153,600 - $250,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

Microsoft will accept applications for the role until December 26, 2024

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.