Senior Applied Scientist Job at Microsoft Corporation (Redmond)

Senior Applied Scientist

Microsoft Corporation

Location:
United States , Redmond

Category:
IT - Software Development

Contract Type:
Not provided

Salary:

119800.00 - 234700.00 USD / Year

Save Job

Apply Position

Job Description:

The Core Recommendation Ranking team in Microsoft AI Content Org powers the end-to-end ranking and reranking stack behind Microsoft's content experiences — including news, interest, video, and AI-generated content (AIGC) feeds, reaching hundreds of millions of users worldwide. We are at the forefront of integrating Generative AI and agentic systems into large-scale recommendation pipelines. We are seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to design, build, and optimize ranking and recommendation models that directly impact user engagement across Microsoft's content ecosystem. In this role, you will work hands-on with cutting-edge deep learning and LLM-enhanced ranking systems while collaborating closely with engineering and product partners to deliver production-quality solutions at scale.

Job Responsibility:

Design & implement ranking, reranking, and retrieval models using deep learning, LLMs, and advanced recommendation techniques
Own end-to-end ML pipelines — feature engineering, model training, offline/online evaluation, and production inference optimization
Innovate by applying state-of-the-art methods including LLM-enhanced ranking, contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, and generative recommendation approaches
Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, product, and platform teams to translate research insights into shipped features
Contribute to technical direction within the team — propose experiments, identify opportunities, and drive projects from ideation to production
Mentor less experienced scientists and engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and knowledge sharing

Requirements:

Bachelor'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 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.
4+ years of industry experience in applied science, machine learning, or deep learning at scale
Solid foundation in recommendation systems, ranking models, or search relevance
Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow) and cloud-scale ML infrastructure
Proficiency in Python and data processing tools (Spark, Pandas, or equivalent)
Track record of shipping ML models to production with measurable user impact
Experience with LLM-based ranking, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or generative recommendation systems
Familiarity with multi-objective optimization, heterogeneous signal fusion, or user modeling
Experience with online experimentation (A/B testing, interleaving) and metrics-driven development
Publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, WWW, RecSys, SIGIR)
Exposure to agentic AI systems or autonomous content curation pipelines
Experience with distributed ML training and large-scale data pipelines

Nice to have:

Master'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 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

Additional Information:

Job Posted:
April 16, 2026

Employment Type:

Fulltime

Work Type:

On-site work

Microsoft Corporation - All Job Offers

Job Link Share: