Overview

Follow-on Suggestions are suggestions that appear after an AI or search engine responds to a user query, such as suggestions/prompts in Copilot or People Also Ask and Related Searches experiences in Bing. These suggestions help users quickly continue their search, complete their tasks and explore related topics. The Follow-on Suggestions team in STCI, in the Microsoft AI (MAI) organization develops these features for Copilot and Bing.

The team is recruiting a Software Engineer to lead development of follow-on suggestion experiences that reduce user friction and enable task completion. A suitable candidate will have solid Software Engineering skills with practical experience in integrating machine learning models in production workflows in both online and offline settings. Moreover, the candidate will also have solid experience in building and optimizing distributed systems that are able to leverage available compute and storage resources to build efficient applications for serving users. We hire people motivated to solve the hard problems, keen to work in a larger team of data scientists and engineers, and ready to make a difference in how search and AI assistant landscape evolves.

We are a team of engineers, scientists, and program managers who come from different backgrounds and experiences, and we share a common vision of making the world smarter and more productive. We think that inclusive teams of individuals who care about customers and trust each other are the key to building great products. We work together across the company to find the technology breakthroughs from groups like Microsoft Research and to bring AI into other Microsoft products.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

We would like you to get a peek into our culture on Instagram (@lifeatstci) and below is more about this job and what we are looking for. Happy applying!!

Visit us at https://aka.ms/STCI

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.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI (MAI) employees who live within a 50-mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Responsibilities

As a Software Engineer with applied AI focus, you will apply both software engineering and AI expertise to build intelligent, scalable solutions. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver high-impact features aligned with enterprise standards and cloud-scale requirements. Your responsibilities include:

• Design, implement, and ship AI-first product capabilities end-to-end from rapid prototype to production, spanning LLM-powered services, retrieval/grounding pipelines, and intelligent UX experiences.
• Design and execute offline and online experiments to assess product impact, iterating on techniques to improve models and maximize impact.
• Own implementation across the full stack integrating front-end experiences, back-end services, and AI orchestration layers that connect models, context, and tools to deliver cohesive, extensible, high-performance systems.
• Collaborate with design, research, and platform teams to adapt or fine-tune, optimize LLMs/SLMs models for real-world customer scenarios, ensuring outcomes are contextual, transparent, and human-centered.
• Build agentic, tool-using, and multimodal workflows that reason across data and services; optimize for safety, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Contribute to engineering excellence secure-by-design, accessibility compliance, automated testing, and code craftsmanship across the product lifecycle.
• Drive live-site reliability and operational excellence, participating in On-Call rotations while maintaining a sustainable, high-ownership engineering culture.

Qualifications Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or related technical discipline with proven experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• OR equivalent experience.
• Professional experience working with generative artificial intelligence, large language models or agent-based systems.
• Comfortable driving complex server and client architecture across large product teams.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLM evaluation techniques, including LLM-as-a-Judge, agentic evaluations and RAG assessments.
• A track record of delivering successful, large scale applied ML projects in an industry setting.
• Experience with MLOps practices, model versioning, automated testing, monitoring and CI/CD for machine learning.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Skilled in building and operating infrastructure using Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, and deploying containerized models with Docker, Kubernetes, or similar tools.
• Experience with proficient coding, debugging, and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent problem solving and data analysis skills.
• Outstanding communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field with proven experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• OR equivalent experience.

#MicrosoftAI

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.