Senior Data Scientist

Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be, and take their careers further. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness, and the sky is the limit of thinking in a cloud-enabled world.

Join us in redefining the future of rewards and incentives through data-driven innovation. As a Senior Data Scientist on the Worldwide Incentive Readiness & Rewards team, you'll leverage advanced analytics, AI, and predictive modeling to influence strategic decision-making, optimize incentive programs at global scale, and drive meaningful business impact across Microsoft.

Our sellers are key to how customers and partners understand Microsoft’s products and strategies, but how do we align the conversations of thousands of sellers with each other and with the company’s strategy?  Making sure that the sellers are having the right conversations at the right time is key to the company’s success, and the Worldwide Incentive Compensation team connects strategy to seller behavior in one of the most important ways: by determining how sellers get paid.

Worldwide Incentive Compensation (WWIC) is the team at Microsoft that is responsible for the design, implementation and operations related to the sales and incentive plans across all of Microsoft, impacting 40K+ employees. Our vision is to embody effective, design-to-deployment incentive compensation that inspires sellers to maximize their success and rewards and enables sustainable growth, share, and customer success.

This role blends deep technical expertise in data science with business acumen in sales compensation, operations, payout administration, governance, compliance, and support. You will partner with cross-functional teams to design solutions to drive efficiency, build machine learning solutions and AI agents, and deliver insights that influence operations and delivery of vehicles. In addition, you’ll engage with diverse stakeholders, manage complex relationships, and drive innovation across the organization.

We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist who is willing to work in a dynamic environment to solve real life day-to-day problems, leveraging data science techniques. You will enjoy and be successful in this role if you are curious and willing to improve current approaches and come up with data-driven solutions to ambiguous problems.

As a Senior Data Scientist, you will partner closely with data engineering, product, field, and Finance teams to turn large‑scale telemetry into decision-ready insights. You will help define compensable metrics, design quota models, evaluate outcomes, and ensure our quota distribution is explainable, reliable, and aligned to real business questions. Your work will directly influence product direction, customer success motions, and executive decision‑making.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we’re dedicated to this mission across every aspect of our company. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their highly qualified contributions each day. Join us and help shape the future of the world.

The Senior Data Scientist is responsible for the following:

Business Management:

• Defines quota-setting strategy aligned with business, customer, and solution objectives. Partners cross-functionally to identify and pursue opportunities for applying machine learning and other data-science methods to quota and incentive design.
• Bridges Finance, Sales, Business Sales Operations, and Product teams through deep technical expertise. Drives cross-discipline collaboration and leads efforts to refine intellectual property definitions and methodology improvements.
• Educates field managers and sales leaders on quota methodology, data inputs, and model mechanics through roadshows, workshops, and ongoing enablement — ensuring transparency and building trust in the quota-setting process.

Business Understanding & Impact 

• Demonstrate effective business acumen by aligning data science initiatives with strategic goals and proactively identifying opportunities for innovation and optimization.

• Leverage an understanding of incentive compensation design, levers, operations, payout administration, governance, compliance and support delivery vehicles.
• Collaborate with business teams to frame analytical questions, define hypotheses, and design experiments that inform operations e