Principal Applied Scientist, AI Data Platform (CoreAI)

Join Microsoft’s CoreAI team to build the AI Data Platform, the foundation for secure, scalable, reusable datasets that power model development. 

The AI Data Platform team's mission is to build a central AI data platform that breaks down Microsoft’s data silos and manages the full lifecycle of first-party, third-party, synthetic, and human-labeled data, accelerating AI model development with secure, reusable, and compliant datasets. 

The AI Data Platform team is responsible for large-scale data infrastructure, automation tools, and intelligence services to transform how Microsoft collects, generates, manages, and shares AI training data. 

We are seeking Principal Applied Scientists to drive scientific innovation in data generation, validation, evaluation, and automation. You will set the vision for intelligent, ML-driven services that manage the end-to-end data lifecycle, and partner with leaders across Microsoft to ensure Microsoft’s data investments deliver maximum AI impact.

Responsibilities

• Drive scientific innovation in data generation, validation, evaluation, and automation, setting the vision for intelligent, ML-driven services that manage the end-to-end data lifecycle, and partnering with leaders across Microsoft to ensure Microsoft’s data investments deliver maximum AI impact. 
• Define the scientific vision and roadmap for ML- and agent-driven automation of the dataset lifecycle, including ingestion, validation, PII detection and handling, governance, discovery, and feedback loops. 
• Lead the design and deployment of advanced ML pipelines for synthetic data generation, augmentation, and human-in-the-loop workflows. 
• Establish evaluation methodologies to measure dataset quality, coverage, and downstream impact on large-scale model training. 
• Advance state-of-the-art methods for data-centric AI, including LLM-based evaluation, gap mining, and bias/fairness detection. 
• Mentor and grow a team of applied scientists, providing technical leadership and fostering a culture of excellence. 
• Collaborate with engineering leaders to integrate research into scalable, production-ready platform services. 
• Influence Microsoft’s AI strategy by shaping best practices for data-driven model development and sharing learnings internally and externally. 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python 
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Experience applying ML/AI to real-world problems. 
• Experience leading applied science projects from concept to production. 
• Programming experience in Python and ML frameworks. 
• Demonstrated expertise in data quality, dataset evaluation, or synthetic data generation. 

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