Senior Researcher

The PROSE (programming by example engineering and research) team is advancing the state of the art in program synthesis and shipping these innovations through flagship Microsoft products that impact millions of users worldwide. These products include the world’s most popular spreadsheet software Excel, the industry-leading Integrated Development Environments Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, the power platform suite of products including Power BI, PowerApps, PowerAutomate, and other software tools including Azure Data Studio, Azure Data. We are seeking a Senior Researcher to join our team.

We invite researchers with machine learning, programming language, or software engineering research to apply for a full-time position on the PROSE team at Microsoft. The recent success of large language models (LLMs) creates an opportunity to take a qualitative step forward, to extend dramatically the reach of what users can do with Copilots. Our team provides a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and real-world impact, solving customer problems on a global scale. Researchers design and carry out the research underlying state-of-the-art systems and work together with world-class engineers to implement these systems in production. To learn more about our approach and culture see this award talk on the story behind one of the team’s early innovations: the Flash Fill feature in Excel.

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

• You will research and develop an understanding of state-of-the-art insights, tools, and technologies and apply deep subject matter knowledge to support planning for research projects. You’ll begin to evaluate insights based on their impact and value.

• You will advance a research agenda through one or more research projects, yielding new algorithms, prototypes, insights, and more. You will contribute to ethics and privacy policies and help develop technologies that uphold company values.

• You will expand collaborative relationships with relevant product or business groups and participate in activities such as filing patents and authoring white papers. You’ll collaborate with other researchers and publish papers as a lead author.

• You will provide mentorship by participating in onboarding team members. You’ll guide team members in processes and scenarios, research projects, and their careers.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:  

• Doctorate in relevant field
  • OR equivalent experience.
• At least 2 Artificial Insights-related publications in  machine learning, programming language, HCI, software engineering or relevantvenues (e.g. AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP, NAACL, ACL, POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, ICSE, FSE, CHI, UIST, and comparable). 

• 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:   

• Doctorate in relevant field AND 2+ years related-research experience
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Experience publishing academic papers as a lead author or essential contributor.
• Experience participating in a top conference in relevant-research