Overview

Excel is one of the most widely used and impactful software programs in the world, powering solutions for businesses and individuals across every industry. We are seeking a Principal Applied Science Manager to join the Excel Core team—an opportunity to shape the future of productivity and influence hundreds of millions of users globally. Your mission: bring cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, patterns, and model capabilities into production, delivering intelligent experiences directly in the Excel grid.

As a Principal Applied Science Manager, you will work at the intersection of research and engineering—leading an Applied Science team, writing production-quality code, collaborating with researchers and engineers, and fostering a culture of rapid experimentation that ships. You’ll help define the next generation of AI-powered features in Excel, blending scientific rigor with engineering excellence to create experiences that delight users and transform workflows.

Opportunities in Excel:

• AI-Powered Intelligence in the Grid: Design and deliver Copilot‑powered contextual experiences that improve customer workflows through inline, intelligent assistance. Build scalable systems that anticipate user needs and surface relevant guidance to help users complete their tasks efficiently.
• Develop innovating new functions using Copilot to mix the power of AI with the versatility and richness of the Excel Calculation engine.
• Core Platform Innovation: Excel core functionality and fundamentals, including the Calculation Engine, Collaboration Experiences, Performance and Accessibility.
• Data Visualization & Business Intelligence: Reinvent how users interact with data through Pivot Tables, Charting, and new Copilot-driven insights.
• Cloud-Scale Architecture: Re-architect the service-backed infrastructure that powers collaboration, Copilot, and core cloud capabilities by optimizing file storage and service protocols.
• Strategic Enterprise Partnerships: Work closely with high-impact customers to refine and extend Excel’s platform with a focus on the core fundamentals—calculation, collaboration, reliability, and performance.

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- Defining, leading, and helping to conduct research projects that simultaneously advance the state-of-the-art and directly benefit Microsoft’s core productivity products.
• Drive complex orchestration of Copilot workflows and agent pipelines, blending prompt engineering, tool invocation, and context grounding for productivity scenarios.
• Contribute to the end-to-end development, deployment, and continuous improvement of advanced multimodal machine learning (ML)/ large language model (LLM) systems—including dataset curation, labeling strategy, model architecture, scalable training, and rigorous evaluation (offline and online).
• Stay current with research and industry trends, identifying opportunities to integrate emerging technologies and methods into the Excel Core ecosystem across the entire spectrum of AI adoption.
• Effectively communicating with product leaders (and often Microsoft researchers (MSR)) throughout the planning and execution of applied research projects, which often involves learning and teaching complex concepts.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to define success metrics, design and execute experiments (e.g., A/B testing), monitor user signals, and iterate on deployed features.
• 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.
• 1+ year(s) of people management experience.

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 Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience orchestrating LLM-based agent pipelines - prompt engineering, tool invocation, context grounding and evaluation - for productivity scenarios, alongside other advanced ML techniques.
• Advanced degree (Master or PhD) in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, or related areas with industry experience or research publication in LLMs, ML, or Natural language processing (NLP).
• Proven expertise and background in designing and implementing AI models that serve millions of users in scaled production environments or agent-based workflows for real-world productivity applications.
• Demonstrated success moving applied research into shipped product features, with clear ownership of the end-to-end ML lifecycle—data collection, cleaning, modeling, evaluation, prompt engineering and continuous improvement.
• Experience coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python.
• Deep understanding of transformer-based architectures and hands-on experience with model optimization techniques (quantization, pruning, distillation, adapter tuning).
• Customer-obsessed mentality and passion for translating research breakthroughs into meaningful product impact.
• Experience in designing and debugging complex services.
• Ability to communicate and collaborate with multiple teams.

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Applied Sciences M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

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.