Applied Researcher 2 / Senior Applied Researcher

Microsoft

Confirmed live today High trust
Hybrid

Quick summary

Work type
Hybrid
Location
—
Salary
$102,100–$202,200 / yr
Posted
160 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live today
Closes
Nov 16, 2026

Market check

Salary context

Below market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $194k
This role $152k
$86k $250k
below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays less than 76% of similar roles. Most pay $154,550–$234,362 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $152k versus about $194k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a global technology leader producing software, hardware, and cloud services including Windows, Office 365, Azure cloud platform, Xbox gaming, and Surface devices. Industry: Software & Cloud Computing

Microsoft currently has 694 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $119,800–$234,700 across 651 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Microsoft

At a glance

TL;DR · Applied Researcher 2 / Senior Applied Researcher

The Applied Researcher 2/ Senior Applied Researcher joins the Code|AI team to advance AI for developers. In this role, you will lead groundbreaking research projects, moving them from initial research into production environments. You will collaborate with scientists, engineers, and designers to build and train state-of-the-art models, specifically focusing on post-training code specific models like code completion, code embedding models, and agentic research for Copilot Coding Agent, Copilot CLI, and Copilot Code Review. Your daily work involves creating new datasets from public and internal code, managing large-scale ML experiments, and applying techniques like RAG and evaluation. You will solve technical problems in software engineering by iterating on AI projects at scale using LLMs, CodeLLMs, and AI IDE technologies.

What you'll do

  • Lead groundbreaking research projects from initial concept into production-ready products.
  • Build and train state-of-the-art large-scale machine learning models.
  • Create new datasets using public code and internal Microsoft data.
  • Run experiments to evaluate, iterate, and improve AI projects on a large scale.
  • Apply and advance existing LLM approaches for software engineering, including RAG and evaluation.
  • Stay current with research literature and product advances in AI for software engineering.
  • Contribute to the development of code completion, embedding models, and agentic research.

What we're looking for

  • Master's Degree in a relevant field and 1+ year of related research experience.
  • Bachelor's Degree in a relevant field and 2+ years of related research experience.
  • Equivalent experience to the degree and years of research requirements.
  • Ability to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check.
  • Doctorate in a relevant field and 3+ years of related research experience (preferred).
  • Bachelor's Degree in a relevant field and 5+ years of related research experience (preferred).
  • 3+ years of research or industrial experience with LLMs (preferred).
  • Experience with CodeLLM, Code agents, AI IDEs, top conference participation, or publishing academic papers (preferred).

More like this

Similar roles

Principal Applied Researcher

Microsoft

160 days ago $142,800–$274,800
LLMs Machine Learning RAG AI Large-scale ML Experiments Production Systems GitHub VS Code Visual Studio
4+ yrs exp Hybrid

Senior Applied Researcher

Adobe

San Jose, CA 39 days ago $190,200–$345,650
Generative AI Machine Learning Python Scala Java SQL TensorFlow PyTorch LLMs prompt-engineering AWS Azure CICD Statistical Modeling Cloud Services
10+ yrs exp

Applied Researcher II

Capital One Financial

New York, NY +4 96 days ago
Pytorch AWS Huggingface Lightning VectorDBs LLM NLP Deep Learning RLHF Quantization Model Sparsification Training Parallelism Graph Neural Networks Sequential Models Multivariate Time Series Supervised Finetuning Instruction-Tuning Transfer Learning Tokenization
2+ yrs exp

Applied Researcher II

Capital One Financial

San Jose, CA +4 96 days ago
Pytorch AWS Huggingface Lightning VectorDBs LLM NLP Deep Learning RLHF Quantization Model Sparsification Training Parallelism Graph Neural Networks Sequential Models Multivariate Time Series Supervised Finetuning Instruction-Tuning Transfer Learning Tokenization
2+ yrs exp

Applied Researcher II

Capital One Financial

McLean, VA +2 56 days ago
Pytorch AWS Huggingface Lightning VectorDBs LLM NLP Deep Learning RLHF Quantization Model Sparsification Training Parallelism Graph Neural Networks Sequential Models Multivariate Time Series Supervised Finetuning Instruction-Tuning Adversarial Machine Learning RAG
4+ yrs exp

Senior Staff Applied Researcher

Capital One Financial

McLean, VA +4 61 days ago
Pytorch AWS Huggingface Lightning VectorDBs deep speed NeMo LLM NLP RLHF Self-Supervised Learning Training Optimization Deep Learning Cloud Computing
6+ yrs exp