Senior Applied Scientist

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As a Senior Applied Scientist, you’ll turn cutting‑edge AI into reliable, responsible, and scalable features that ship inside the apps people already use. You’ll partner tightly with PM and Engineering from idea → prototype → GA, own experiments and metrics, and harden models for quality, latency, reliability, and cost—all the way into production services with robust telemetry, monitoring, and live‑site excellence. You’ll work across modern AI stacks (LLMs, RAG, multimodal), train/serve at M365 scale, and uphold Microsoft’s Responsible AI bar. Suzhou combines the energy of a rapidly growing R&D hub with the reach of Microsoft’s global ecosystem—giving you room to build, ship, and grow.

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.

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.
• 2+ years customer-facing, project-delivery experience, professional services, and/or consulting experience
  
• 4+ years applied ML/NLP experience delivering models and features to production at scale.
  
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch (or equivalent DL framework).
  
• Solid SDLC practices: unit/integration testing, CI/CD, code reviews, version control, performance profiling, and reliability hardening.
  
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, efficient code for production services and clients.
  
• Experimentation & evaluation: sound experimental design, metric design (quality, safety, latency, cost), and statistical analysis; experience running online A/B tests.
  
• Proven collaboration with PM & Engineering to integrate ML into shipped product (APIs/services/clients) and to drive measurable user or business impact.

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:

• Master's Degree in Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Econometrics, Economics, Operations Research, Computer Science, or related field AND 3+ years data-science experience (e.g., managing structured and unstructured data, applying statistical techniques and reporting results)
  
  • OR Master's Degree in Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Econometrics, Economics, Operations Research, Computer Science, or related field AND 5+ years data-science experience (e.g., managing structured and unstructured data, applying statistical techniques and reporting results)
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Data Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Econometrics, Economics, Operations Research, Computer Science, or related field AND 7+ years data-science experience (e.g., managing structured and unstructured data, applying statistical techniques and reporting results)
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Graduate degree (MS/PhD) in ML/AI or related field (or equivalent applied research impact).
• Depth in transformers/LLMs (pretraining, SFT, alignment/RLHF/DPO), RAG, prompt/agent tooling, and safety/abuse mitigation for generative systems.
• Production ML engineering at scale:
• Model serving/inference (e.g., ONNX Runtime, vLLM, Triton, quantization, distillation, caching, dynamic batching, rate limiting).
• Service development: stable APIs/SDKs, microservices, feature flags, safe rollouts/rollbacks, config & traffic ramps.
• Observability & live‑site: SLIs/SLOs, dashboards, structured logging, tracing, alerting, on‑call, and postmortems.
• Experimentation: A/B & interleavings, guardrail metrics (quality/safety/latency/cost), sequential testing, eval governance.
• Data engineering: ETL at scale (Spark/Databricks), feature stores, vector indexing (Azure AI Search/FAISS/Milvus), data quality checks.
• Cloud & orchestration: Azure ML, AKS/Kubernetes, containerization, autoscaling, artifact & secret management, policy enforcement.
• Security & privacy: data minimization, access controls, audit logging in enterprise SaaS contexts.

• Ship features with PM & Engineering. Co‑own scenario goals; translate product requirements into scientific plans and productionized solutions that meet quality/latency/cost targets.
• Model development & optimization. Design, fine‑tune, and evaluate models for LLM‑based authoring, summarization, reasoning, voice/chat, and personalization (e.g., SFT, alignment, prompt/tool use, safety filtering, multilingual & multimodal).
• Data & evaluation at scale. Build/extend data pipelines for curation/labeling/feature stores; author offline eval harnesses; run online A/Bs and interleavings; define guardrails and success metrics; author scorecards and decision memos.
• Production ML engineering. contribute to service code and configs; add monitoring, tracing, dashboards, and auto‑scaling; participate in on‑call and postmortems to improve live‑site reliability.
• Responsible AI. Produce review artifacts, document mitigations for safety/privacy/fairness, support red‑teaming and sensitive‑use checks, and align with Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard.
• Collaboration & mentoring. Partner across PM/ENG/Design/CE/ORA/CELA; share methods and code, review PRs, improve reproducibility and documentation; mentor junior scientists.