Principal Applied Scientist

Microsoft

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Redmond, WA
Salary
$142,800–$274,800 / yr
Posted
12 days ago
Closes
Dec 12, 2026
Nearby
99+ roles within 25 mi

Market check

Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $198k
This role $209k
$127k most similar roles pay here $291k

This role pays more than 59% of similar roles. Most pay $162,000–$234,150 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $209k versus about $198k 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 622 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $119,800–$234,700 across 571 roles with salary data.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Principal Applied Scientist

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As a Principal Applied Scientist on the Microsoft Content team, you will lead the development of intelligent content platforms that power AI-driven experiences for over 1 billion users across various Microsoft products. Your daily work involves modeling, experimentation, and technical leadership to enhance how AI systems retrieve information, reason contextually, maintain multi-turn conversations, use tools, rank responses, and produce reliable outputs grounded in trusted data. You will develop ranking and reranking models, build grounding systems for reliable answers, and improve end-to-end search quality through query understanding, semantic retrieval, and latency-aware ranking. Preferred qualifications include deep expertise in large language models, information retrieval, and agentic AI, along with hands-on experience in tuning and optimizing models at scale using techniques like supervised fine-tuning and model distillation.

Skills

Python Java C++ TensorFlow PyTorch Kubernetes Docker AWS Azure Google Cloud Platform PostgreSQL MongoDB CI/CD Git GitHub Jenkins Prometheus Grafana Elasticsearch Kafka Spark Hadoop Distributed Systems Large Language Models Information Retrieval Learning-to-Rank Conversational AI Agentic AI

What you'll do

  • Lead the development of grounding and search systems for Microsoft's AI platforms.
  • Improve ranking models to enhance search result quality across various surfaces.
  • Build systems that enable AI agents to generate reliable answers from trusted sources.
  • Enhance end-to-end retrieval quality through advanced query understanding techniques.
  • Advance multi-turn agent experiences by improving context understanding and tool use.
  • Optimize models for grounded behavior using supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization.
  • Define evaluation methods to measure success in ranking, retrieval, and grounding quality.

What we're looking for

  • Deep expertise in large language models and information retrieval systems.
  • Extensive experience building and deploying machine learning models in production.
  • Proven ability to lead complex scientific projects and influence product direction.
  • Hands-on experience with offline and online evaluation methods for AI systems.
  • Demonstrated skill in working with large-scale datasets and distributed training systems.
  • Strong communication skills to explain technical concepts to both experts and non-experts.

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