Principal Applied Scientist
Technology, Data & Digital · Data, AI & Analytics · Data Science · Software Engineering
In short
Microsoft Monetization is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist and Technical Lead to drive the science vision, technical strategy, and execution for AI-powered advertising and commerce experiences across Search, Shopping, and Copilot. This role requires deep expertise in machine learning and AI, with a proven record of technical leadership in shipping large-scale production systems.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical lead for AI-powered relevance, shopping, recommendation, and agentic commerce initiatives across Copilot, Shopping, and Ads experiences.
- Drive innovation in machine learning technologies including LLMs, SLMs, multimodal AI, retrieval, ranking, personalization, and recommendation systems.
- Define and execute the science roadmap for user intent understanding, product understanding, content relevance, and advertiser matching.
- Lead end-to-end ML development, including model architecture, training data strategy, evaluation, experimentation, calibration, and production deployment.
- Partner with engineering and product teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient AI systems.
- Shape the technical vision for future agent experiences, conversational shopping, and AI-assisted commerce scenarios.
- Drive measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, engagement, relevance quality, and business outcomes.
- Mentor scientists and engineers while raising the technical bar across machine learning, experimentation, and scientific rigor.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years related experience OR Master's Degree AND 6+ years related experience OR Doctorate AND 5+ years related experience OR equivalent experience.
- Extensive experience building and shipping large-scale machine learning systems in search, recommendation, ranking, advertising, commerce, conversational AI, or personalization.
- Deep expertise in modern machine learning, including deep learning, transformers, representation learning, retrieval systems, recommendation systems, and foundation models.
- Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead for large-scale cross-organizational initiatives.
- Proven ability to translate research innovations into production systems with measurable business impact.
- Experience with LLMs, SLMs, multimodal AI, and agentic systems.
- Experience in advertising, e-commerce, shopping, recommendation, or marketplace ecosystems.
- Experience developing AI-powered assistants, commerce experiences, or personalization platforms.
- Experience optimizing distributed training and inference systems on large GPU clusters.
- Experience mentoring principal-level engineers, scientists, and technical leaders.
Benefits
- 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.
- 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
#AI#Machine Learning#Advertising#Commerce#Search#Shopping#Copilot#LLMs#Recommendation Systems#Personalization#Agentic Experiences
Company
Microsoft
Job Posted
2 weeks ago
Employment Type
Full Time
WorkMode
Hybrid
Experience Level
Senior
Locations
United States
Qualification
Bachelor, Master, Doctoral
Applicants
Be an early applicant