Senior Applied Scientist

Job description

The Microsoft Teams Mobile team is reimagining how individuals and organizations collaborate on-the-go, enabling seamless, intelligent communication from any device, anywhere.

As we bring next-generation AI into the mobile productivity experience, we’re looking for a **Senior Applied Scientist** to lead the integration and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs), SLMs and AI-Native use cases into our mobile-first scenarios.

In this role, you'll drive innovation at the intersection of AI, user interaction, and mobile UX, influencing key aspects of LLM evaluation, prompt engineering, cost-optimized finetuning, and responsible AI (RAI) deployment in a mobile context.

You’ll collaborate across engineering, product, design, and research to ensure our AI-powered mobile experiences are fast, trustworthy, helpful, and delightful.

This role offers the opportunity to shape how millions of users experience AI-enhanced productivity on their phones — from real-time meeting summaries to intelligent message replies and mobile agentic workflows.

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**

AI Strategy & Leadership

+ Develop and execute the strategy for LLM evaluation and finetuning for mobile scenarios, balancing quality, cost, speed, and power/resource constraints.
+ Champion the use of SLMs and custom-tuned models to deliver efficient and reliable performance on mobile devices.

LLM & Prompt Evaluation

+ Design and lead experiments that assess the performance, effectiveness, and safety of language models and prompts in mobile contexts.
+ Leverage synthetic and user-generated data to continuously improve prompt quality and user experience.

Mobile-Centric AI Experiences

+ Partner with UX, product, and engineering teams to optimize AI workflows for mobile-specific use cases (e.g., on-device summarization, smart notifications, multimodal interactions).
+ Translate complex scientific insights into product features that enhance real-time communication and collaboration on mobile.

Program Management & Infrastructure

+ Own and evolve the end-to-end evaluation pipeline, ensuring seamless integration with product development cycles.
+ Develop robust measurement frameworks and dashboards to report on LLM performance, user utility, and business impact.

Responsible AI

+ Apply Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles to ensure the AI in Teams Mobile is safe, inclusive, transparent, and accountable.
+ Proactively identify and mitigate bias, hallucinations, and privacy risks, especially in mobile-centric experiences.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Thought Leadership

+ Drive alignment across Microsoft Teams, M365 Copilot, Azure OpenAI, and research partners.
+ Contribute to internal and external research in LLM evaluation, mobile UX, and agentic AI, including publications, white papers, or patents.

**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 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
+ OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 5+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
+ OR equivalent experience.
+ Proven experience applying machine learning and LLMs to real-world product scenarios.
+ Deep expertise in:
+ Prompt engineering.
+ Finetuning and SLM optimization.
+ Evaluation frameworks for LLM quality, utility, latency, and cost.
+ RAG, agentic workflows, and multi-turn dialogue systems.
+ Solid development skills in Python and hands-on experience building ML/AI pipelines.
+ Experience leading complex, cross-functional technical programs or research initiatives.
+ Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
+ Demonstrated understanding of Responsible AI principles, especially in privacy-constrained or mobile environments.

**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:**

+ Ph.D. or Master’s in a relevant field (e.g., Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, HCI).

#CAPIDC

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer.

Consistent with applicable law, 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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .

Required Skill Profession

Other General