Senior Applied Scientist - CoreAI

Microsoft's Enterprise customers have a challenge - they need the tools to build agentic experiences over public and private knowledge.The Azure AI Knowledge teamis leading the way to deliver the next chapter of agentic retrieval throughFoundry IQKnowledge basestobring together many sources ofstructured and unstructured enterprise dataand transformitinto knowledge.We arecontinuously developing and deploying new capabilities to meet the demands of complex queries that require reasoning and reflection to deliver high quality results. Our customers span many different industries, corpus sizes and scenarios, and our work includes multiple aspects, such as:

• Developing LLM prompts,agentsand query execution workflows, often with tight latency constraints

• Collection, generation and filtering of training and evaluation data

• Building offstate of the arttechniques from across Microsoft and the industry

• Use of AI coding patterns to parallelize and accelerateexperimentation

You canfollow ourprogression from better search, to RAG,to agentic retrieval:

• Azure AI Search: Outperforming vector search with hybrid retrieval and ranking capabilities-Microsoft Community Hub

• Raising the bar for RAG excellence: introducing generative query rewriting and new ranking model

• Up to 40% better relevance for complex queries with new agentic retrieval engine

• Foundry IQ: boost response relevance by 36% with agentic retrieval | Microsoft Community Hub

As a team, we leverage the diverse backgrounds and experiences of passionate engineers, scientists,and program managers to help us realize our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We believe great products are built by inclusive teams of customer-obsessed individuals who trust each other and work closely together. We collaborate regularly across the company with teams like M365, Bing and Microsoft Research.

A major aspect of this role is to push our development of knowledge retrieval to the frontier. This requires a capable individual who canleveragemultiple coding agents to explore new techniques (autoresearch, claws, CLI systems,etc) and bring them to production at scale.

If you are passionate about workingonthe latest and hottest areas in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and data science, all the while making search better for customers across the world, then this is the teamyou'relooking for!

1. Independently incorporatestate of the artresearchintotechniquesshipped to production.

1. Develop and buildmetrics to useacross the full range of search engine components.

1. Seek out and incorporate customer feedback intodataset construction,evaluation, andtechniquedevelopment.

1. Drivestechnical excellence andcontributeto experimentation infrastructure andproofs-of-conceptusing AI coding agents.

1. Advances the quality of the team's experimental codebase to ensure experiments are efficient and repeatable.

1. Workcollaborativelywithproductmanagement,engineers, and other functions across products.

1. Driveclear and efficient plans, documents, and communication

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor'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 Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:
Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master'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 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.
• 1+ year(s) experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.
• Experience with agentic coding systems, including scaffolding for longrunning agents.
• Experienced hybrid collaboration skills, with clear async/sync communication and teamwork.
• Experience defining taskspecific metrics and evaluation datasets.
• Customerfocused and executiondriven, with strong ownership and bias for action.
• Experienced problemsolver, comfortable with novel, openended problems.

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