Principal Applied Science Manager

Follow-on Suggestions are suggestions that appear after an AI or search engine responds to a user query, such as suggestions/prompts in Copilot Search or the People Also Ask and Related Searches experiences in Bing. These suggestions help users quickly continue their search, complete their tasks and explore related topics. The Follow-on Suggestions team in STCI team in the Microsoft AI organization develops these features for Copilot Search and Bing.

The team is recruiting a Principal Applied Science Manager to lead the development of impactful projects focused on enhancing follow-on suggestion experiences through recommendation systems, generative AI, and natural language processing. This position will oversee the design, testing, and deployment of AI solutions that enable follow-on suggestions in Copilot Search, Bing, and Edge. The successful candidate will collaborate closely with data scientists, engineers, researchers, and product teams across Microsoft to advance suggestion capabilities and evaluate integration with AI agents for task completion.

Key responsibilities include designing and managing experiments, developing and evaluating advanced models such as RAG pipelines and fine-tuning frameworks, and translating research outcomes into scalable product features. Additionally, the role bridges research and production by applying data-driven methodologies to guide decisions, optimise processes, and deliver quantifiable results at scale.

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.

• Lead, mentor and grow a diverse world-class team of applied scientists, engineers and researchers.
• Lead research and productization of follow-on suggestions in AI assistants and Search by creating clarity, generating energy and delivering user value.
• Build, refine and deploy machine learning models to solve NLP tasks and productizing the solutions at scale.
• Drive experimentation through A/B testing and offline validation to evaluate model performance.
• Collaborate across disciplines and geographies with product teams in Microsoft.
• Ensure solutions meet all security, privacy, and regulatory standards.
• Stay up to date with the research literature and product advances in AI for suggestion experiences.
• Contribute ideas and techniques to create and improve product quality metrics.
• Participate in planning, design, implementation and execution with a team of engineers, applied scientists and product managers.
• Lead others by exemplifying growth mindset, inclusiveness, teamwork, and customer obsession. 

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.
• 1+ year(s) of people management experience.
• Solid professional experience in statistics, machine learning, including deep learning, NLP, econometrics.
• Excellent communication skills, ability to present and write reports, solid teamwork and collaboration skills.
• Experience in productizing AI and collaborating with multidisciplinary teams.
• Ability to synthesize the research literature, compare/contrast/critique and combine ideas into creating new ML models.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in building large scale recommendation systems and experience working with big data stack for data processing and data science.
• Published work in top-tier conferences & journals.

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. 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.

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

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