Applied Scientist

Required Qualifications

• A record of publication in top-tier scientific venues (ongoing or in the recent past) (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, KDD, WWW, CHI, PNAS, Nature)
• Experience coding and hands-on experience working with foundation models.
• Ability to apply research, preferring the large-scale application of new ideas over theory and prototypes.
• Demonstrated collaboration and communication skills, both within-team and cross-team, and experience working through problems in ambiguous environments adapting to new research challenges as technology develops.

Other Requirements

• As a part of your application please attach your CV and the names and contact information of at least three established researchers familiar with your research who will be willing to write a letter of reference. One of these people should be your Ph.D. advisor.
• (Optional) A cover letter discussing your interest in the role and how your experience connects with the topics in this call.
• (Optional) A brief academic statement that outlines both your research achievements and agenda and up to two papers that highlight your research interests.

Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements that 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

• 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

• Experience working on successful applied research projects in industry environments 
• Record of publication specifically on applications of language models or very closely related areas
• An applicants will come with the following skills would be a plus:  
  • Applications of Foundation Models 
  • Domain Adaptation of Foundation Models (e.g. fine-tuning LLMs/SLMs) 
  • Vision, Audio, and Multimodal Foundation Models 
  • On-device Foundation Models 
  • Trust, Privacy, and Foundation Models 
  • Agentic Systems 
  • Prompt Tuning 
  • Natural Language Processing 
  • Applied Machine Learning 
  • Data Mining with Language Models 
  • Human-AI Interaction
  • Computational Social Science

Applied Sciences IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $117,200 - $229,200 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 $153,600 - $250,200 per year.

Applied Sciences IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $137,600 - $267,000 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 $180,400 - $294,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

Microsoft will accept applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.