Senior Researcher, Office Product Group

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

Senior Researcher role within the Office Product Group focused on advancing AI-powered experiences in Microsoft 365 applications. The role involves designing, developing, evaluating, and deploying AI systems that can reason and act across tools and documents, balancing innovation with production readiness.

What you'd actually do

  1. Support the development of frameworks that enable coordination and communication across multiple AI components, helping to facilitate task delegation, orchestration, and result validation scenarios.
  2. Apply and improve techniques for efficient code generation and transformation in low-resource environments, including adapting models to domain-specific languages, formulas, and structured or semi-structured data formats.
  3. Implement and iterate on fine-tuning and post-training approaches for large-scale machine learning models to enhance reliability, controllability, and readiness for production use.
  4. Contribute to the design and execution of evaluation strategies and benchmarks that reflect real-world Microsoft 365 user workflows, including participation in system-level and human-in-the-loop assessments.
  5. Collaborate with engineering and product management partners to help translate research ideas into scalable, production-ready features, with attention to user experience, performance, and responsible AI practices.

Skills

Required

  • Doctorate in relevant field OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 4+ years related research experience OR equivalent experience.

Nice to have

  • Doctorate in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 6+ years related research experience OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 8+ years related research experience OR equivalent experience.
  • Experience contributing to research initiatives, including authorship or meaningful contributions to academic publications.
  • Experience engaging with the research community through participation in conferences, workshops, or similar forums within a relevant domain.
  • Familiarity with evaluation methods for generative and agent-based systems, including offline benchmarking and online experimentation approaches.
  • Experience working with large language models and agent-based systems, including prompt design, tool integration, contextual memory, and system orchestration.
  • Experience applying fine-tuning and post-training techniques to large-scale models, including supervised fine-tuning, preference-based methods, reward modeling, or reinforcement learning approaches.
  • Experience collaborating across research and engineering teams to support the transition of solutions from prototype to production scenarios.
  • Communication and collaboration skills with experience contributing to cross-functional work, navigating ambiguity, and supporting end-to-end problem solving.

What the JD emphasized

  • Required Qualifications: Doctorate in relevant field OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience
  • Preferred Qualifications: Doctorate in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience
  • Experience working with large language models and agent-based systems, including prompt design, tool integration, contextual memory, and system orchestration.
  • Experience applying fine-tuning and post-training techniques to large-scale models, including supervised fine-tuning, preference-based methods, reward modeling, or reinforcement learning approaches.

Other signals

  • AI-powered experiences embedded directly into Microsoft 365 applications
  • delivering them at scale to support hundreds of millions of users worldwide
  • reason, take action, and work across tools, documents, and services