Principal Applied Scientist - Microsoft 365 Copilot

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Our team is responsible for the core systems that power [Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot-microsoft365-chat) delivering intelligence, quality, and transformative new features. We work at the intersection of research and engineering—advancing orchestrator reasoning, training next-generation models, and shipping impactful, model-driven experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

As a Principal Applied Scientist - Microsoft 365 Copilot, you will:

• Evolve our orchestrator to reason more effectively, respond faster, and support new capabilities in multi-modality, agent-based systems, and beyond
• Advance the state of the art in model training—including post-training methods such as fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, high-quality data curation, and experimentation with frontier model training
• Build and deliver model-driven features from concept to production—spanning model development, evaluation, metrics, and A/B testing

Recent launches like [Analyst Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft Community Hub](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365copilotblog/analyst-agent-in-microsoft-365-copilot/4397191) showcase the breadth and depth of impact you’ll help drive across the stack.

This role requires you to be onsite 3 days a week in Microsoft's offices in Redmond, WA.

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 6+ 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 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years of experience with end-to-end in a challenging technical problem domain (plan, design, execution, continuous release, and service operation).
  
• 4+ years experience with shipping internet scale, low latency and high throughput systems AI products.
  
• 4+ years experience with customer/End-result/Metrics driven in design and development.

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 Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 5+ years experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers).
• 2+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
• Publications at top conferences like ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing), SIGKDD (Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining), AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining), COLING (International Conference on Computational Linguistics), WWW (World Wide Web Conference), NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), ICASSP (International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing), etc.

Applied Sciences IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 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 $188,000 - $304,200 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 October, 24, 2025.

#M365Core

• Conduct research and development to push the boundaries of model training, evaluation, and quality assessment for AI solutions.
• Post-train LLMs for enterprise scenarios M365 Copilot and on tenant data to enable task-specific agents and solutions within the enterprise ecosystem.
• Collaborate with engineers and researchers to advance deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), multimodal models, and model optimization techniques.
• Measure, analyze, and report on model performance, quality, and impact using predictive analytics and statistical methodologies.