Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft

Confirmed live yesterday High trust

Hybrid

Quick summary

Work type: Hybrid
Location: —
Salary: $142,800–$274,800 / yr
Posted: 2 days ago
Freshness: Confirmed live yesterday
Closes: Apr 6, 2027

Market check

Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $219k

This role $209k

$127k $291k

below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 50% of similar roles. Most pay $195,010–$242,078 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $209k versus about $219k 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 634 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $119,800–$234,700 across 612 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 Web Data Platform team to advance content understanding and web-scale intelligence. You will design, develop, and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning, information retrieval, large language model, and agentic AI solutions. Your daily responsibilities include driving scientific strategy, leading end-to-end development of scientific solutions, and establishing rigorous experimentation frameworks. You will utilize Python, C++, C#, or Java to build systems that improve quality, trust, and safety across the web ecosystem. The role focuses on solving technical problems related to content quality, knowledge discovery, risk detection, and mitigating abuse, spam, and fraud. You will work on large-scale machine learning initiatives to ensure that search and AI reasoning systems surface authoritative, reliable information while managing emerging risks from low-quality AI-generated content.

What does a Applied Scientist earn?

Median $231000 from 39 postings across 10 companies.

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Skills

Machine Learning Information Retrieval Generative AI Python C++ C# Java Distributed Data Processing NLP Prompt Engineering Responsible AI Model Governance Classification Recommendation Systems Evaluation Frameworks Statistics Predictive Analytics

What you'll do

Design, develop, and deploy machine learning, information retrieval, and agentic AI solutions for web-scale content.
Drive scientific strategy and technical direction for large-scale AI initiatives across the Web Data Platform.
Lead end-to-end development of scientific solutions from problem formulation to production deployment and impact measurement.
Establish rigorous experimentation frameworks, evaluation methodologies, and success metrics to drive scientific excellence.
Develop novel approaches for content understanding, risk detection, trust modeling, and ecosystem health measurement.
Advance technologies to mitigate abuse, spam, fraud, and low-quality AI-generated content across the web.
Mentor other scientists and contribute to recruiting and cultivating world-class talent.
Define long-term technical roadmaps and identify new opportunities for AI to create customer value.

What we're looking for

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field and 6+ years of experience, Master's and 4+ years, or Doctorate and 3+ years of experience.
Equivalent experience to the degree and years of experience requirements.
Master's degree and 9+ years of experience, or Doctorate and 6+ years of experience (preferred).
Proven track record of shipping machine learning or AI capabilities at internet scale (preferred).
Experience developing ranking, retrieval, classification, quality, trust, safety, spam, abuse, content understanding, or recommendation systems (preferred).
Hands-on experience with foundation models, LLMs, SLMs, agents, evaluation frameworks, and prompt engineering (preferred).
Experience with distributed data processing and model training using large-scale compute platforms (preferred).
Solid software engineering skills in Python, C++, C#, Java, or similar languages (preferred).

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