Senior Researcher

The PROSE team is advancing the state of the art in artificial intelligence for end users and programmers, and shipping these innovations through flagship Microsoft products that impact millions of users worldwide. These products include the world’s most popular spreadsheet software Excel, the industry-leading IDEs Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, the power platform suite of products including Power BI, PowerApps, PowerAutomate, and other software tools including Azure Data Studio, Azure Data Monitor, Azure Data Factory, PowerShell, and SQL Server Management Studio. The application domains range from developer productivity, business user low-code/no-code scenarios to even programming education. To power these features PROSE has developed a powerful and flexible framework for program synthesis that leverages techniques from both logical reasoning and machine learning (including LLMs) and combines them in unique ways to synthesize programs automatically. This approach has been recognized with frequent papers at top-tier conferences and awards, including best paper and test-of-time awards.

We invite researchers with machine learning, data science, and software engineering research experience to apply for a full-time position on the PROSE team at Microsoft. The recent success of large language models (LLMs) creates an opportunity to take a qualitative step forward, to extend dramatically the reach of what users can do with Copilots. Our team provides a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and real-world impact, solving customer problems on a global scale. Researchers design and carry out the research underlying state-of-the-art systems and work together with world-class engineers to implement these systems in production. To learn more about our approach and culture see this on the story behind one of the team’s early innovations: the Flash Fill feature in Excel.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Required Qualifications:

• Doctorate in relevant field AND 2+ years related-research experience
  • OR equivalent experience.
• At least 2 AI-related publications in top-tier machine learning, programming language, HCI, software engineering or relevant venues (e.g. AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP, NAACL, ACL, POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, ICSE, FSE, CHI, UIST, and comparable).
• Ability to develop an original research agenda, demonstrated by leading at least one publication in a top-tier machine learning, programming language, software engineering, HCI or relevant venue.
• At least 3 years of prior research experience in machine learning, programming language, software engineering, or human-computer interaction.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience publishing academic papers as a lead author or essential contributor.
• Experience participating in a top conference in relevant-research domain.
• Experience working with large language models, including automated prompt tuning, fine-tuning, agents, planning, instruction-tuning and continued pre-training.
• Experience in training transformer-based models (including collecting and curating training data) as part of research projects in an industrial or academic setting.
• Experience with reinforcement learning and its applications to training LLMs.
• Have interests in applying machine learning to software engineering or data handling and analysis tasks.
• Hold previous industrial research internship positions.
• Experience collaborating across multi-disciplinary or multi-role teams.
• Strong communication skills.

• Design and carry out innovative AI research with applications to code and data platforms (e.g., Visual Studio and Excel).
• Work with engineers and PMs to deploy your research to customers.
• Collaborate with academic partners, mentor interns and longer-term .
• Publish in top-tier academic venues and interact with the broader academic community.