Senior Applied Scientist

About the role

Microsoft’s Copilot Discover team is building the next generation of AI‑powered ranking and content‑quality systems that surface trustworthy, relevant content across Microsoft surfaces. As a Senior Applied Scientist you will lead the scientific strategy behind these systems, combining large language models, multimodal models, and large‑scale recommender technologies to improve engagement, satisfaction, and trust.

Key responsibilities

• Design and deploy large‑scale models that evaluate credibility, usefulness, freshness, safety, and diversity across text, image, audio, and video.
• Partner with policy and platform teams to embed safety standards, create red‑team and adversarial safeguards, and reduce misinformation and toxicity.
• Collaborate with engineering on data contracts, feature stores, distributed training/inference, and automated rollout/rollback pipelines.
• Define offline metrics (e.g., Rejection Rate, ERR, Defect Rate) and online experimentation methods (A/B tests, interleaving, bandits) to measure business impact.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor a high‑caliber science cohort, and drive knowledge‑sharing through design reviews and deep‑dives.

Required profile

• Proven experience leading applied research in large‑scale AI systems, preferably in ranking or content‑quality domains.
• Strong track record of publishing, mentoring, and influencing cross‑functional teams (engineering, PM, UXR, policy).
• Ability to translate user engagement signals into measurable model improvements.

Required skills

• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Multimodal modeling
• Large‑scale recommender systems
• Distributed training and inference
• Feature store design
• Offline evaluation metrics (Rejection Rate, ERR, Defect Rate)
• Online experimentation (A/B testing, interleaving, bandit algorithms)

What we offer

• Opportunity to shape AI‑driven content experiences for hundreds of millions of users.
• Collaboration with world‑class researchers and engineers.
• Access to Microsoft’s extensive AI infrastructure and resources.