Microsoft
Applied Researcher 2/ Senior Applied Researcher
$102K–$261K
Redmond, WA +2 · On-site · Senior · Full-time · Posted May 20, 2026
- Location
- Redmond, WA
Mountain View, CA
New York, NY - Experience
- Required: 1+ year related research experience with a master's degree, or 2+ years with a bachelor's degree, or equivalent experience. Preferred alternatives include 3+ years with a master's degree or 5+ years with a bachelor's degree; also preferred: 3+ years of research/industrial experience with LLM.
- Education
- Master's degree in a relevant field, or bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent experience.
About the job
Leads applied research on AI for software development, taking projects from research through product experiments and deployment across Microsoft and GitHub developer tools.
What you'll do
- Build and manage large-scale machine-learning experiments and models, and create datasets from public code and Microsoft's internal data.
- Collaborate with researchers, engineers, designers, and product teams to test, evaluate, and improve AI projects.
- Track research and product advances in AI for software engineering.
What they ask for
- Master's degree in a relevant field and 1+ year of related research experience, or bachelor's degree in a relevant field and 2+ years of related research experience, or equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.
Nice to have
- Doctorate in a relevant field, or a master's degree and 3+ years of related research experience, or a bachelor's degree and 5+ years of related research experience, or equivalent experience; 3+ years of research/industrial experience with LLM.
- Experience with CodeLLM, code agents, or AI IDEs; participation in a top research conference; or lead-author or essential-contributor academic publications.
Pay
USD $102,100 - $202,200 per year (base salary); USD $133,800 - $219,200 per year (base salary); USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year (base salary); USD $160,200 - $261,000 per year (base salary)
Tools
LLMs, RAG, CodeLLM, Copilot, VS Code, Visual Studio
AI focus
Applied research and model development for AI-assisted software engineering and developer tools, including code completion, code embeddings, and agentic systems.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative