Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more and we believe that artificial intelligence will play a critical role in accomplishing that mission. The Core Search and AI team is the leading applied machine learning team at Microsoft responsible for delivering the highest-quality search experience to over 500M+ monthly active users around the world in Microsoft’s search engine, Bing and other dependent search engines such as Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and new startups like Neeva.

We have seen little innovation in search in the last decade and we are looking for people who want to build the next generation of search using advanced AI technologies at scale. We are responsible for the largest machine learning models at Microsoft by volume and take pride in being the first in the world to solve many practical AI at Scale challenges. Our work spans a very large scope of scenarios including delivering high quality search results from a massive document corpus, extractive and abstractive summarization to generate document snippets, personalization, machine reading comprehension, and document recommendations.

As a team, we leverage the diverse backgrounds and experiences of passionate engineers, scientists, and program managers to help us realize our goal of making the world smarter and more productive. We believe great products are built by inclusive teams of customer-obsessed individuals who trust each other and work together closely. We collaborate regularly across the company both to find the technology breakthroughs from groups like Microsoft Research to infusing AI into the rest of Microsoft products like Office and Azure.

Some examples of our work include:
1. Developing a massive sparse neural network to improve search relevance (covered by SiliconAngle, Search Engine Land, Venture Beat)

2. Building the world’s most comprehensive spelling correction system through zero shot learning (covered by NextWeb, Venture Beat, and ZDNet)

3. Using transformer networks for search (covered in Search Engine Land and in State of AI 2020 report)

4. Deep learning based question answering and captions (covered in VentureBeat, Search Engine Land)

5. Launching our technology as a cloud service on Azure (a summary of the technologies we used)

6. Co-developing our large scale training library called DeepSpeed (covered in SiliconAngle, The Batch)

7. Open sourcing our vector search algorithm (covered by Ars Technica and TechCrunch)

8. Building and open sourcing blazing fast transformer network inferencing (covered in ZDNet and Forbes) including developing our own accelerated chips for inferencing

If you are passionate about working on the latest and hottest areas that will help you develop skills in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, data science and high scale systems, this is the team you’re looking for

**Responsibilities**:

- We need a strong technical lead to direct a team of engineers and scientists in discovering and building the next wave of innovations in search.
- Work closely with Program Management to deliver a roadmap towards solving the needs of our users by building the most relevant, freshest, and authoritative results while being strategically differentiated from our biggest competitors.
- Lead a team to define, design, and deliver product quality improvements from ideation stage to shipping to the customer.
- Focus on the whole team's productivity and strive to increase the impact of the team's work product.
- Define and build systems and strategies to ensure high quality, stable, performant code and state-of-the-art algorithms being shipped in production.
- Make independent decisions for the team and handle difficult tradeoffs.
- Translate strategy into plans that are clear and measurable, with progress shared out monthly to stakeholders.

**Qualifications**:
Required Qualifications:

- Bachelor, Masters or advanced degree
- 7+ years of experience coding in Python, C++, C#, C or Java

Preferred Qualifications:

- Customer focused, strategic, drives for results, is self-motivated, and has a propensity for action
- Bachelors or advanced degree
- Good organizational, analytical, data science skills and intuition
- Good problem solver; ability to solve problems that the world has not solved before
- Interpersonal skills: cross-group and cross-culture collaboration.
- Experience with real world system building and data collection, including design, coding and evaluation

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.