The Principal Applied Scientist role at Microsoft focuses on leading the science behind the Discover content-quality stack. This position involves utilizing LLMs, multimodal models, and large-scale recommender systems to enhance user engagement and trust. The successful candidate will mentor a team of scientists and collaborate with various departments to deliver impactful AI solutions. The role emphasizes the importance of safety and integrity in content delivery across Microsoft platforms.

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience.
• Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience.
• Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience.
• Expertise with LLMs, multimodal modeling, and retrieval-augmented recommendation.
• 2+ years of experience working with recommender systems/ranking or content-quality/safety models at consumer scale.

• Lead content-quality understanding at scale.
• Design and deploy models that assess credibility, usefulness, freshness, safety, and diversity across modalities.
• Advance the recommendation and ranking stack by architecting and productionizing large-scale DNN/LLM-enhanced recommenders.
• Own evaluation and experimentation by defining offline metrics and online methodologies.
• Champion safety and trust by partnering with policy and platform teams.
• Scale end-to-end ML systems in collaboration with engineering.
• Mentor and influence peers through technical leadership and knowledge-sharing.
• Stay close to users by translating user engagements into model objectives.

• Employees at Microsoft are often offered comprehensive, “world-class” benefits—including health and mental-wellness programs, competitive pay with bonuses and stock awards, and retirement/savings options. Time-off and flexibility are common, with generous vacation and holidays, parental and caregiver leave, and flexible work schedules, alongside learning support, employee resource groups, product discounts, and matching-gifts/volunteering programs. Specific benefits can vary by region.