Overview

We are building a frontier AI team inside the Office Product Group to push the next generation of agentic AI systems embedded directly into Office applications. This team sits at the intersection of research and product: inventing new model- and system-level capabilities, and shipping them at global scale to hundreds of millions of users.

As an Applied Scientist, you will design, train, evaluate, and deploy agentic AI systems that reason, act, and collaborate across tools, documents, and other agents—grounded in real product constraints.

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

• Design and build agentic AI systems for Office apps (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook), including planning, tool use, memory, and long-horizon task execution.
• Develop agent-to-agent communication frameworks, enabling coordination, delegation, and verification across specialized agents.
• Advance low-resource code generation and transformation, including adapting models to domain-specific languages, formulas, and semi-structured representations.
• Fine-tune and post-train foundation models (SFT, preference optimization, RLHF/PO variants) for reliability, controllability, and product-grade behavior.
• Own evaluation and benchmarking: design task-level, system-level, and human-in-the-loop evals that reflect real Office workflows—not just academic metrics.
• Partner closely with engineers and PMs to turn research ideas into scalable, shippable features with clear UX and performance guarantees.

Qualifications Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 2+ 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 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
• OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field
• OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Understanding of evaluation methodology for generative and agentic systems, including offline benchmarks and online experimentation.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic systems, including prompting, tool calling, memory, and orchestration.
• Experience with fine-tuning and post-training large models (SFT, preference learning, reward modeling, or RL-style approaches).
• Ability to move comfortably between research prototypes and production systems.
• Communication skills and a product mindset—comfort owning ambiguous problems end-to-end.

Applied Sciences IC3 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $100,600 - $199,000 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 $131,400 - $215,400 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.