Senior Applied Scientist

Microsoft Microsoft · Big Tech · Redmond, WA +1 · Applied Sciences

Senior Applied Scientist role focused on building and shipping AI-powered recommendation and generative experience systems for Microsoft's consumer ecosystem. The role involves end-to-end ownership of the personalization stack, including large-scale retrieval, deep ranking, whole-page optimization, reinforcement learning, and LLM-powered generative experiences, serving billions of requests daily with low-latency production infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead the design and development of large-scale recommendation, ranking, personalization, and generative AI systems serving billions of users across Microsoft consumer products.
  2. Drive technical strategy and architecture across retrieval, ranking, reranking, whole-page optimization, and LLM-powered experiences.
  3. Develop state-of-the-art machine learning models for engagement optimization, long-term user satisfaction, monetization, and trust-aware personalization.
  4. Lead innovation in generative AI, multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, and context-aware recommendation technologies.
  5. Define and drive multi-objective optimization frameworks balancing user engagement, quality, diversity, trust, and revenue outcomes.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience OR Master's Degree AND 3+ years related experience OR Doctorate AND 1+ year(s) related experience OR equivalent experience.

Nice to have

  • Master's Degree or Doctorate in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or related field.
  • Proven experience in machine learning (ML), recommender systems, ranking, search, or personalization.
  • Experience building and shipping large-scale production ML systems.
  • Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
  • Understanding of experimentation, metrics, and model evaluation.
  • Experience with billion-scale user systems and low-latency serving.
  • Publication or innovation track record in ML/AI systems.
  • Demonstrated technical leadership and cross-functional influence.
  • Recommendation systems.
  • Ranking/search systems.
  • Ads optimization.
  • Sequential modeling.
  • Reinforcement learning.
  • LLMs and generative AI.
  • Multi-agent systems.
  • Large-scale distributed systems.

What the JD emphasized

  • billions of users
  • billions of requests daily
  • low-latency production infrastructure
  • large-scale retrieval
  • deep ranking
  • whole-page optimization
  • reinforcement learning
  • LLM-powered generative experiences
  • multi-agent systems

Other signals

  • large-scale retrieval
  • deep ranking
  • LLM-powered generative experiences
  • reinforcement learning
  • multi-agent systems