Microsoft
Senior Applied Scientist
$120K–$261K
Redmond, WA +2 · On-site · Senior · Full-time · Posted Oct 29, 2026
- Location
- Redmond, WA
Mountain View, CA
New York, NY - Experience
- Required: 4+ years with a bachelor’s degree, 3+ years with a master’s degree, or 1+ year with a doctorate; equivalent experience accepted. Preferred alternatives include 6+ years with a master’s degree or 3+ years with a doctorate. Additional preferred experience includes 3+ years in publications or research programs and 1+ year deploying production systems or products.
- Education
- Bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent experience.
About the job
Advances enterprise search and retrieval for Microsoft Copilot products by researching, evaluating, deploying, and improving machine-learning approaches at scale.
What you'll do
- Lead applied research and improve sparse, dense, and query-understanding methods for agentic and traditional search.
- Evaluate retrieval quality using datasets, offline analysis, and production experiments; balance relevance, latency, and efficiency.
- Take research-backed solutions through deployment, monitor results, and provide scientific leadership across teams.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in a listed or related field plus 4+ years of related experience, OR master’s degree plus 3+ years, OR doctorate plus 1+ year, OR equivalent experience.
- Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including the Microsoft Cloud Background Check.
Nice to have
- Master’s degree plus 6+ years of related experience, OR doctorate plus 3+ years, OR equivalent experience; experience creating publications, presenting at research or industry events, or conducting research.
- Experience with agentic search, information retrieval, production deep-learning systems, Python, PyTorch, evaluation, and cross-functional product delivery.
Pay
USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year (base salary); USD $160,200 - $261,000 per year (base salary)
Tools
large language models (LLMs), Python, PyTorch
AI focus
Applied research and development of retrieval and search algorithms for Copilot, using large language models, machine learning, sparse and dense retrieval, and query understanding.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative