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Principal Applied Scientist - Copilot
Microsoft
H1B ✓Hybridsenior levelPosted April 25, 2026
About the Role
The Principal Applied Scientist will scope, design, and deliver advanced machine learning and LLM solutions to enhance Microsoft 365 Copilot. Responsibilities include advancing model training techniques, optimizing orchestrator reasoning, and conducting rigorous quality assessment for enterprise-grade AI features.
Requirements
Candidates must hold a Bachelor's, Master's, or Doctorate degree in a technical field such as Computer Science or Statistics, combined with significant professional experience in research or predictive analytics. A strong background in deploying production-scale AI systems and a track record of academic or industry research publications are highly preferred.
Full Job Description
Overview
Responsibilities
Qualifications
Come build the core of Microsoft Copilot for enterprise with Microsoft Turing Team, where you'll join a collaborative group of applied scientists and engineers pushing the frontier of large language models (LLMs) to improve the productivity of hundreds of millions of users around the world.
Our team is responsible for the core systems that power [Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot-microsoft365-chat) delivering intelligence, quality, and transformative new features. We work at the intersection of research and engineering—advancing orchestrator reasoning, training next-generation models, and shipping impactful, model-driven experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
As a Principal Applied Scientist - Copilot, you will:
- Evolve our orchestrator to reason more effectively, respond faster, and support new capabilities in multi-modality, agent-based systems, and beyond
- Advance the state of the art in model training—including post-training methods such as fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, high-quality data curation, and experimentation with frontier model training
- Build and deliver model-driven features from concept to production—spanning model development, evaluation, metrics, and A/B testing
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.
Responsibilities
- Independently scope, design, and deliver applied ML/LLM solutions for AI product problems.
- Conduct research and development to push the boundaries of model training, evaluation, and quality assessment for AI solutions.
- Post-train LLMs for enterprise scenarios M365 Copilot and on tenant data to enable task-specific agents and solutions within the enterprise ecosystem.
- Collaborate with engineers and researchers to advance deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), multimodal models, and model optimization techniques.
- Measure, analyze, and report on model performance, quality, and impact using predictive analytics and statistical methodologies.
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.
- 5+ years experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers).
- 2+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
- 5+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
- 3+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team.
- 3+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.
- 4+ years of experience with end-to-end in a challenging technical problem domain (plan, design, execution, continuous release, and service operation).
- 4+ years experience with shipping internet scale, low latency and high throughput systems AI products.
- 4+ years experience with customer/End-result/Metrics driven in design and development.
- Publications at top conferences like ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics), EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing), SIGKDD (Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining), AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining), COLING (International Conference on Computational Linguistics), WWW (World Wide Web Conference), NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), ICASSP (International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing), etc.
#MachineLearning, #LLM, #Chat
Applied Sciences IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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.