Principal Researcher, Office Product Group

We are building a high-impact AI engineering and applied science team within the Office Product Group to advance the next generation of intelligent, AI-powered experiences embedded directly into Microsoft 365 applications.

As a Principal Researcher, you will contribute to the design, development, evaluation, and deployment of AI systems that can reason, take action, and work across tools, documents, and services.

Responsibilities

• Support the development of frameworks that enable coordination and communication across multiple AI components, helping to facilitate task delegation, orchestration, and result validation scenarios.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’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 Master’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 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.

The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 – $274,800 per year.