Principal Applied Scientist-Speech

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 thinking in a cloud-enabled world.

We are looking to hire a Principal Applied Scientist-Speech to assist the speech team in building innovative speech recognition solutions that power Copilot, Teams, Office, Windows, and various third-party customer applications. Our solutions are world-class and continuously evolving. We do not just value differences or different perspectives. We seek them out and invite them in so we can tap into the collective power of everyone in the company. As a result, our customers are better served.

Come join us! This role is flexible in that you can work up to 100% from home.

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.

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day.

Responsibilities

Bringing the State of the Art to Products

• Collaborates with and bridges the gap between researchers (in community across the company, Microsoft Research [MSR], or in their own organizations) and development teams. Brings new technology and approaches into production by applying long-term research efforts to solve immediate product needs. Drives high-stakes negotiations across teams to ensure cutting edge technology is being applied to products in a practical way that meets key business objectives. Applies an understanding of research approaches used across the company and industry to leverage (and not re-invent) solutions. Begins to represent the organization across the company.
• Independently works to create product impact. Identifies approach and applies, improves, or creates a research-backed solution (e.g., novel, data driven, scalable, extendable) to positively impact a Microsoft product or service. Helps to shape the direction of Microsoft and/or the industry with industry-leading product/tooling work. Identifies significant business problems hindering product impact with other disciplines. May publish research to promote receiving new intellectual property for product impact.
• Design and implement high performance components and algorithms that make up the speech real-time recognition engines.
• Drive consensus across multiple teams on appropriate solutions.
• Implement telemetry and logging to monitor the health of the features continually and automatically.
• Support team in investigating customer issues and producing mitigations.
• Quickly learn about the speech recognition area to improve efficiency of the work and enable better prioritization.

Leveraging Applied Research

• Expertise within team on changes in industry/market trends, products, industry advances, and opportunities in applied technologies across a broad range of applied research areas. Shares and acquires knowledge of applied research areas with engineers and product teams to apply advanced concepts to influence product needs and drive action toward solutions.
• Reviews business and product requirements and incorporates state-of-the-art research occurring at Microsoft and the academic field to formulate plans that will meet business goals. Identifies complex or difficult problems and develops strategy to resolve problems across the company. Provides strategic direction for the kinds of data used to solve problems

Capability Management and Networking

• Identifies and inspires peers and new research talent to join Microsoft. Builds trusted relationships with key internal and external stakeholders to develop long-term partnerships and advocate for research initiatives. Participates in candidate screening and interviewing and forms job descriptions for attracting new talent. May share research findings through publications or industry outreach. Collaborates with the academic community to develop the recruiting pipeline, identify cutting-edge solutions for products, and establish awareness of their work

Specialty Responsibilities

• Addresses scalability problems by adjusting to stakeholder needs. Directs others in the use of large-scale computing frameworks and pros and cons of each (e.g., bottlenecks for scalability and how to solve them), and modeling environments using cutting-edge industry methodologies to imp