Senior Researcher SDE / Applied Scientist

Join the AI Platform - Core AI organization and help bridge cutting‑edge AI research with real‑world engineering. As part of Azure AI Knowledge group, we build Document Intelligence capabilities that semantically structure documents for intelligent processing across traditional scenarios (RPA, search indexing, compliance and security, creative workflows) and modern LLM‑based applications (RAG, agent memory). 

As a Senior Research Software Development Engineer, you’ll provide technical leadership at the research–product boundary: partner with product teams to formulate requirements as modeling problems, co‑invent multimodal methods with leading researchers, and independently turn prototypes into robust, production‑ready solutions used by customers worldwide. You’ll deepen your expertise in business understanding, multimodal modeling, and scalable systems while shipping production AI. 

You’ll shape innovations in document layout and structure analysis from early exploration through deployment - our models process billion level pages across cloud services and edge devices, and your work will directly power these experiences. Your impact will ensure Microsoft’s latest advances in Document AI land in products and sustain our pace of innovation. We hope you combine independent thinking with openness to diverse ideas, lead by example with strong hands-on skills, ground decisions in data and rigorous experimentation, move with urgency and iterate quickly in a fast‑changing technology landscape, pursue technical excellence with enthusiasm, and tackle big challenges with curiosity and resilience. 

Join the team that is on a mission to empower people through AI in everyday document tasks. 

Responsibilities

• You will master one or more subareas and gain expertise in a broad area of research, including applicable research techniques. You’ll also gain deep knowledge of a service, platform, or domain, and identify product needs by sharing the latest industry trends and applied technologies. 
• You will review business requirements and incorporate research to meet business goals. You’ll provide strategic direction for the kinds of data used to solve problems and apply deep subject matter knowledge to support business impact. 
• You will participate in onboarding of junior team members and assist in developing academics to be members of multidiscipline teams. You’ll identify new research talent to join Microsoft and collaborate with the academic community to develop the recruiting pipeline. 
• You will document work in progress and experimentation results and share findings to promote innovation. You’ll also use your deep understanding of fairness and bias to contribute to ethics and privacy policies related to research processes and data collection. 

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications (Rqs/Mqs)

• 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. 
• Strong coding skills in both high-level and systems languages (e.g., Python for ML, C++/C#/Java for performance-critical components). 
• Solid grasp of ML techniques in CV/NLP, with experience applying deep learning models (Transformers, CNNs) using frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow. 
• Proven track record of deploying ML models to production, with expertise in scalable services, software best practices, and optimizing inference for speed and efficiency. 

Additional or Preferred Qualifications (PQs) 

• Master'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 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. 
• Domain expertise in OCR, document layout analysis, or multimodal AI. 
• Experience with large-scale cloud services (Azure, or similar) for ML pipelines, containerization, and MLOps (CI/CD for model deployment). 
• Experience in research collaboration & innovation 
• Experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings). 
• OR experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers). 
• OR experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.