New

Principal Applied Scientist - CoreAI

Microsoft
$142,800.00 - $274,800.00 / yr
United States, California, Mountain View
Jul 14, 2026
Overview Microsoft's Enterprise customers have a challenge - they need the tools to build agentic experiences over public and private knowledge. The Azure AI Knowledge team is leading the way to deliver the next chapter of agentic retrieval through Foundry 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, agents and query execution workflows, often with tight latency constraints Collection, generation and filtering of training and evaluation data Building off state of the art techniques from across Microsoft and the industry Use of AI coding patterns to parallelize and accelerate experimentation You can follow our progression 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 Foundry IQ: Improve recall by up to 54% with knowledge bases \| 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 likeM365,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 can leverage multiple 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 team you're looking for! Responsibilities Leadstate of the art researchincorporationintotechniquesshipped to production. Proactively develop and build metrics to use across the full range of search engine components. Seek out and incorporate customer feedback intodataset construction,evaluation, andtechniquedevelopment. Leadtechnical excellence and contribute to experimentation infrastructure and proofs-of-conceptusing AI coding agents. Advances the quality of the team's experimental codebase to ensure experiments are efficient and repeatable. Nurturescollaborativerelationshipswithproductmanagement,engineers, and other functions across products. Driveclear and efficient plans, documents, and communication Qualifications Required 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. 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 9+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience. 3+ 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 long-running agents. Experience with hybrid collaboration skills, with clear async/sync communication and teamwork. Experience defining task-specific metrics and evaluation datasets. #CoreAI #AIPLATFORM Applied Sciences IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled. Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.