Principal Applied Scientist

Copilot Discover, part of Microsoft AI, helps surface relevant content across Microsoft surfaces. We're seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to lead the science behind Discover's ranking and content-quality stack.

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you'll combine LLMs, multimodal models, and large-scale recommender systems to drive engagement, satisfaction, and trust. You'll set technical direction, mentor a high-caliber science cohort, and partner with engineering, PM, UXR, and policy to ship end-to-end outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead content-quality understanding at scale, designing and deploying models to assess credibility, usefulness, freshness, safety, and diversity.
• Advance the recommendation and ranking stack, architecting and productionizing large-scale DNN/LLM-enhanced recommenders.
• Own evaluation and experimentation, defining offline metrics and online methodologies.
• Champion safety and trust, partnering with policy and platform teams to encode safety standards.
• Scale E2E ML systems, collaborating with engineering on data contracts and distributed training.
• Mentor and influence, providing technical leadership and upleveling peers.
• Stay close to users, translating user engagements into model objectives and product bets.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's, Master's, or Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, or related field with relevant experience.
• Required experience: 6+ years with Bachelor's, 4+ years with Master's, or 3+ years with Doctorate.
• Preferred qualifications include publications at top AI/ML conferences, expertise with LLMs and multimodal modeling, and experience with Microsoft stack.

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