Senior Applied Scientist II (CoreAI)

Microsoft’s Enterprise customers have a challenge – they need the tools to build agentic experiences over public and private knowledge. The Azure AI Knowledge team is leading the way to deliver the next chapter of RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) that can bring together many sources of data and transform data into knowledge. We are expanding Azure AI Search, Azure’s retrieval platform to meet the demands of complex queries that require reasoning and reflection to deliver high quality results. Our customers span many different industries, corpus sizes and scenarios, and our work includes multiple aspects, such as: 

• Developing LLM prompts, agents and query execution workflows, often with tight latency constraints 
• Collection, generation and filtering of training and evaluation data 
• Building off state of the art techniques from across Microsoft and the industry 

As a team, we leverage the diverse backgrounds and experiences of passionate engineers, scientists, and program managers to help us realize our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We believe great products are built by inclusive teams of customer-obsessed individuals who trust each other and work closely together.  We collaborate regularly across the company with teams like Bing and Microsoft Research.  

A major aspect of this role is to push our development of knowledge retrieval to the frontier. This requires a capable individual who is well versed in both deep learning and LLM techniques – someone who can solve the hardest challenges where the latest reasoning models are best suited, and create low latency options where speed is critical. 

If you are passionate about working on the latest and hottest areas in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and data science, all the while making search better for customers across the world and being part of one of the biggest cloud providers, then this is the team you’re looking for! 

Responsibilities

• Incorporate state of the art research into techniques shipped to production. 
• Develop and build metrics to use across the full range of search engine components. 
• Seek out and incorporate customer feedback into dataset construction, evaluation and technique development. 
• Provide technical excellence and contribute to experimentation infrastructure and proofs-of-concept to test out new ideas and concepts. 
• Advances the quality of the team’s experimental codebase to ensure experiments are efficient and repeatable.  
• Work collaboratively with program management, engineers, and other functions across products. 
• Contribute to team plans, documents, and communication in a clear and efficient way. 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 2+ 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 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field OR equivalent experience. 
• 2+ years of experience coding in Python, C#, Java or C++. 
• 2+ years of experience with large language models. 

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

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 5+ 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 experience developing and deploying live production systems as part of a product team. 
• Excellent hybrid work skills – clear synchronous and asynchronous communication, strong teamwork and collaboration skills 
• Experience developing task specific metrics and evaluation datasets 
• Customer focused, strategic, drives for results, is self-motivated, and has a propensity for action. 
• Problem solver: ability to solve problems that the world has not solved before. 

Applied Sciences IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $100,600 - $199,000 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 $131,400 - $215,400 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 posts positions for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

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.

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