Summary
Microsoft AI are looking for a talented Principal Applied Scientist at their Mountain View office. This role sits at the heart of strategic decision-making, turning market data into actionable insights for a company that's revolutionising AI-powered quality understanding and recommendation systems.
About the Role
As a Principal Applied Scientist, you'll lead the science behind Discover's ranking and content-quality stack, combining LLMs, multimodal models, and large-scale recommender systems to drive measurable gains in engagement, satisfaction, and trust. You will set technical direction, mentor a high-caliber science cohort, and partner closely with engineering, PM, UXR, and policy to ship end-to-end outcomes.
Accountabilities
- Lead content-quality understanding at scale.
- Advance the recommendation & ranking stack.
- Own evaluation and experimentation.
- Champion safety & trust.
- Scale E2E ML systems.
- Mentor & influence.
- Stay close to users.
The Candidate we're looking for
Experience:
- 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).
Technical skills:
- Expertise with LLMs (prompting, finetuning, RAG), multimodal modeling, and retrieval-augmented recommendation; familiarity with counterfactual learning and multi-objective optimization.
Personal attributes:
- Demonstrated ability to lead cross-disciplinary efforts (PM, ENG, UXR, editorial/policy) from idea to shipped impact; mentoring scientists and setting technical vision.
Benefits
- Competitive salary.
- Comprehensive benefits package.
- Opportunities for professional growth and development.
- Collaborative and dynamic work environment.
