Principal Applied Scientist - Small Language Models

Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group is seeking a visionary and hands-on Principal Applied Scientist to lead research and development in SLM, VLM, multimodal AI, across language, vision and agent workloads. This role is ideal for candidates passionate about building real-world systems that unify visual and textual modalities to power next-generation user experiences across devices and platforms. As a senior member of the team, you will drive innovation across model architecture, training, and deployment, especially for scalable autoregressive models that handle both language, structured text and reasoning tasks. You will also play a key role in converting cutting-edge research into practical applications and experiences for users across the globe.