Senior Applied Scientist - Copilot & Agents

We're seeking a Senior Applied Scientist with expertise in Applied AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning to shape the future of enterprise productivity through cutting-edge Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI-powered experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

You will join a fast-paced team of scientists, engineers, and product managers working at the forefront of AI innovation, driving the development of advanced LLM-based capabilities, reasoning systems, and real-time orchestration platforms.

Responsibilities

• Develop scientific approaches for evaluating and improving LLM reasoning, grounding, retrieval, and agentic behaviours using offline benchmarking, online experimentation, and large-scale telemetry analysis.
• Drive complex technical investigations, model evaluations, and experimentation to improve quality, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, and user experience.
• Define and execute rigorous evaluation methodologies, offline benchmarks, online experimentation frameworks, and data-driven approaches for measuring model and product performance.
• Partner with engineering and product teams to translate research innovations into scalable, production-ready systems.
• Analyse model behaviour, failure modes, grounding effectiveness, reasoning quality, tool use, retrieval performance, and orchestration outcomes to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Develop and advance approaches for agentic workflows, multi-step reasoning, planning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool orchestration, and reinforcement-learning-based optimisation.
• Review technical designs, experimental results, and implementation approaches to ensure high standards of scientific rigor, reproducibility, and engineering excellence.
• Collaborate with researchers, applied scientists, and engineers to solve challenging technical problems spanning LLMs, machine learning, deep learning, information retrieval, and human-AI interaction.
• Stay current with advances in Large Language Models, reasoning systems, agent architectures, reinforcement learning, and applied AI, incorporating relevant innovations into production systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND demonstrated professional related experience.
• Master's Degree or Doctorate in related fields also considered.

Preferred Qualification:

• A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Math, Physics, Statistics, or related areas.
• Demonstrated professional working as an IC in Machine Learning, Large Language Models, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, or related fields.
• Professional experience developing ML models for scaled production services, with a proven track record of successfully shipping applied research to production.
• Experience designing and implementing agentic AI models and systems.

The typical base pay range for this role across the United Kingdom is £74,700.00 – £122,600.00 per year.