Senior Software Engineer

The Vertical Ads Algorithm & Infrastructure team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer. This team is responsible for the selection, relevance, and modeling of vertical ads, as well as the offline and online infrastructure for serving and experimenting with cutting-edge algorithms. These algorithms range from natural language processing (NLP) to information retrieval. In this role, you will design, implement, analyze, and optimize complex algorithms that operate on large datasets. You will collaborate with top scientists and engineers across Microsoft's global R&D team. The team heavily leverages deep learning methodologies using Microsoft AI to build solutions and solve complex problems, aligning with Microsoft's Commerce Strategy, where Vertical Ads play a central role.

Online Advertising is one of the fastest growing businesses on the Internet today, with about $70 billions of a $600 billion advertising market already online.  Search engines, web publishers, major ad networks, and ad exchanges are now serving billions of ad impressions per day and generating terabytes of user events data every day. Rapid online advertising growth has created enormous opportunities and technical challenges that demand computational intelligence. Computational Advertising has emerged as a new interdisciplinary field that involves information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, statistics, operations research, and micro-economics, to solve challenging problems that arise in online advertising. The central problem of computational advertising is to select an optimized slate of eligible ads for a user to maximize a total utility function that captures the expected revenue, user experience and return on investment for advertisers.  Microsoft is innovating rapidly in this space to grow its share of this market by providing the advertising industry with the state-of-the-art online advertising platform and service. Microsoft Ads Relevance and Revenue (RnR) team is at the core of this effort, responsible for research & development of all the algorithmic components in our advertising technology stack, including:    

• User/query intent (text and image) understanding, document/ad understanding, user targeting - Relevance modeling, IR-based ad retrieval  
• User response (click & conversion) prediction using large scale machine learning algorithms - Marketplace mechanism design and optimization, and whole-page experience optimization - Personalization 
• Innovative new ads products   
• Network protection, fraud detection, traffic quality measurement    
• Advertising metrics and measurement, including relevance and ad campaign effectiveness    
• Data mining and analytics   
• Supply-demand forecasting   
• Ad campaign planning and optimization   
• Experimentation infrastructure includes tools for configuring and launching experiments, dashboard, live marketplace monitoring, and diagnosis. 

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

• Conduct R&D on intelligent search advertising systems to mine and learn actionable insights from large scale data.
• Play a key role in driving algorithmic and modeling improvement to the system.
• Develop novel algorithms in the space of sponsored search to constantly improve the operational efficacy and monetization impact to stake holders.  
• Analyze Giga/Tera bytes of logs and create observation/opportunities and avenues of improvements in the system. 
• Design and development of large scale online and offline platform tools for Ads related products.
• Ideate on newer aspects of advertising avenues and augment the platform with richer products for the stakeholders.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP) on Deep Learning

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in online advertising. 
• Knowledge in at least one scripting language (Python, Perl, Ruby, etc).
• Experience working with Big Data technologies like Hadoop, Spark, Cosmos etc.
• Experience in parallel or distributed processing, high performance computing, stream computing.  
• Ability to work independently in a team to deliver innovative solutions solving challenging business/technical problems from high level vision and architecture, down to quality design and implementation.      

Software Engineering 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 February 17, 2025

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.

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