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Excel is one of the most widely used and impactful software programs in the world, powering solutions for businesses and individuals across every industry. We are seeking a Principal Applied Science Manager to join the Excel Core team—an opportunity to shape the future of productivity and influence hundreds of millions of users globally. Your mission: bring cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, patterns, and model capabilities into production, delivering intelligent experiences directly in the Excel grid. As a Principal Applied Science Manager, you will work at the intersection of research and engineering—leading an Applied Science team, writing production-quality code, collaborating with researchers and engineers, and fostering a culture of rapid experimentation that ships. You’ll help define the next generation of AI-powered features in Excel, blending scientific rigor with engineering excellence to create experiences that delight users and transform workflows.
Job Responsibility:
Defining, leading, and helping to conduct research projects that simultaneously advance the state-of-the-art and directly benefit Microsoft’s core productivity products
Drive complex orchestration of Copilot workflows and agent pipelines, blending prompt engineering, tool invocation, and context grounding for productivity scenarios
Contribute to the end-to-end development, deployment, and continuous improvement of advanced multimodal machine learning (ML)/ large language model (LLM) systems—including dataset curation, labeling strategy, model architecture, scalable training, and rigorous evaluation (offline and online)
Stay current with research and industry trends, identifying opportunities to integrate emerging technologies and methods into the Excel Core ecosystem across the entire spectrum of AI adoption
Effectively communicating with product leaders (and often Microsoft researchers (MSR)) throughout the planning and execution of applied research projects, which often involves learning and teaching complex concepts
Collaborate with engineering and product teams to define success metrics, design and execute experiments (e.g., A/B testing), monitor user signals, and iterate on deployed features
Embody our culture and values
Requirements:
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
OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience
OR equivalent experience
1+ year(s) of people management experience
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter
Nice to have:
Experience orchestrating LLM-based agent pipelines - prompt engineering, tool invocation, context grounding and evaluation - for productivity scenarios, alongside other advanced ML techniques
Advanced degree (Master or PhD) in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, or related areas with industry experience or research publication in LLMs, ML, or Natural language processing (NLP)
Proven expertise and background in designing and implementing AI models that serve millions of users in scaled production environments or agent-based workflows for real-world productivity applications
Demonstrated success moving applied research into shipped product features, with clear ownership of the end-to-end ML lifecycle—data collection, cleaning, modeling, evaluation, prompt engineering and continuous improvement
Experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
Deep understanding of transformer-based architectures and hands-on experience with model optimization techniques (quantization, pruning, distillation, adapter tuning)
Customer-obsessed mentality and passion for translating research breakthroughs into meaningful product impact
Experience in designing and debugging complex services
Ability to communicate and collaborate with multiple teams