Principal Applied Scientist

As an Principal Applied Scientist on the People Analytics team, you will leverage your expertise to drive innovation and lead efforts to design, develop, and deliver scalable, high-quality solutions powered by LLMs. This role offers a unique opportunity to work on end-to-end systems that integrate data, engineering, LLMs, and user experience. The position is based in Redmond, WA, USA, and requires working from the office at least three days per week.

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

• Serve as a team expert on changes in industry trends, products, and other advances, and apply this knowledge to influence product needs.
• Review business and product requirements, incorporate engineers and product manager, and provide strategic direction for problem solving.
• Ensure scientific rigor, support the development of methods, and apply your expertise to support business impact.
• Document work and experimentation results and share findings to promote innovation.
• Provide guidance when capturing processes and contribute to ethics and privacy policies related to research processes and data collection.
• Design end-to-end solutions and lead the team in integrating AI capabilities into the product.
• Embody our culture and values.

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 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Solid engineering background with hands-on experience integrating AI projects into customer solutions.

• Experience building or evaluating LLM-based or generative AI solutions in production environments

• Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into measurable ML problems and deliver scalable solutions.

• Deep understanding of experiment design, model evaluation, and responsible AI principles (fairness, interpretability, bias mitigation).

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 C