Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft

Confirmed live yesterday High trust
Hybrid

Quick summary

Work type
Hybrid
Location
—
Salary
$142,800–$274,800 / yr
Posted
11 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live yesterday
Closes
Mar 8, 2027

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Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $212k
This role $209k
$127k most similar roles pay here $291k

This role pays more than 58% of similar roles. Most pay $185,500–$237,787 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $209k versus about $212k 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 658 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $119,800–$234,700 across 642 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Principal Applied Scientist

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The Principal Applied Scientist joins the Microsoft 365 Copilot Reasoning Science team within the CACore organization to build reliable, long-horizon agentic capabilities for M365 Copilot Chat. This role focuses on advancing frontier-model harness engineering and evaluation to enable AI agents to plan, reason, and execute complex, multi-step tasks. Day-to-day responsibilities include managing experiments from inception to shipment, creating ML pipelines and algorithms, defining rigorous evaluation methodologies, and developing tools to accelerate team workflows. The candidate will contribute to strategic planning, technical roadmaps, and the growth of the applied science culture. Required skills include expertise in agentic engineering, machine learning systems at internet scale, and experience with large language models, recommender systems, information retrieval, and responsible AI. The role addresses the challenge of creating reliable autonomous agents for enterprise productivity tools.

What does a Applied Scientist earn?

Median $208800 from 47 postings across 11 companies.

See salary data

Skills

LLMs Agentic Engineering Machine Learning Information Retrieval Recommender Systems ML Pipelines Azure Statistics Predictive Analytics Offline Benchmarks Online Experimentation Responsible AI

What you'll do

  • Manage experiments from inception to shipment by creating metrics, ML pipelines, and algorithms.
  • Develop rigorous evaluation methodologies, offline benchmarks, and online experimentation frameworks for model performance.
  • Influence senior leadership through high-quality written and oral summaries of research and results.
  • Build custom tools to accelerate internal workflows when off-the-shelf solutions are insufficient.
  • Contribute to strategic planning and long-term technical roadmaps by incorporating the latest research.
  • Mentor and develop the growth of engineers and applied scientists within the team.
  • Identify new research talent and collaborate with the academic community to build recruiting pipelines.

What we're looking for

  • Bachelor's degree plus 6 years of experience, Master's plus 4 years, or Doctorate plus 3 years in a relevant technical field.
  • Equivalent experience to the specified educational and experience requirements is acceptable.
  • Ability to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check every two years.
  • Proficiency in agentic engineering (preferred).
  • Advanced expertise in agentic engineering (preferred).
  • Master's degree plus 9 years of experience or Doctorate plus 6 years of experience in a relevant field (preferred).
  • 5+ years of experience creating publications such as patents, libraries, or peer-reviewed academic papers (preferred).
  • 5+ years building and maintaining production machine learning systems at internet scale (preferred).

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