# Principal Applied Scientist

**Company**: Microsoft AI
**Location**: Hyderabad
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://microsoft.ai/job/principal-applied-scientist-8/
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_05ee2dc4-b1b

## Description

## Summary

Microsoft AI are looking for a talented Principal Applied Scientist at their Hyderabad office. This role sits at the heart of shaping and improving sports experiences on Bing. You will own end-to-end outcomes: turn ambiguous product questions into measurable hypotheses, define success metrics, design experiments, and ship data-driven ML solutions that move customer and business KPIs.

## About the Role

We are seeking an experienced, self-directed Principal Applied Data Scientist to shape and improve sports experiences on Bing. In this individual contributor role, you will own end-to-end outcomes: turn ambiguous product questions into measurable hypotheses, define success metrics, design experiments, and ship data-driven ML solutions that move customer and business KPIs. You will apply modern NLP/IR and multimodal methods—including training and adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) and Small Language Models (SLMs)—to deliver accurate, fresh, and helpful sports answers and discovery experiences at global scale.

## Accountabilities

- Define north-star metrics and guardrails; build measurement plans, offline scorecards, and online A/B tests; interpret results and drive clear ship/iterate decisions.

- Build, train, and adapt LLM/SLM solutions for sports scenarios (prompting, supervised fine-tuning, distillation, and domain adaptation), using disciplined evaluation and error analysis to improve quality, latency, and cost.

## The Candidate we're looking for

**Experience:**

- 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).

**Technical skills:**

- Proficiency in Python (and one of C++/C#/Java preferred) and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow); experience with distributed training/inference is a plus.

**Personal attributes:**

- Demonstrated ability to lead through influence as a senior IC: independently define strategy, drive execution across teams, and deliver measurable impact.

## Benefits

- Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI employees who live within a 50-mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week.

## Skills

### Required
- statistics
- predictive analytics
- research
- Python
- deep learning frameworks
- distributed training/inference

### Nice to have
- publications
- patents
- open-source contributions