Microsoft · 2 weeks ago
Senior Principal Applied Scientist - Multimodal AI
Redmond, WA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$163K/yr - $296K/yr
5+ years expMicrosoft is seeking a Senior Principal Applied Scientist to lead innovative work in multimodal AI and generative scenarios across OneDrive and SharePoint. This role involves significant technical leadership and the potential for people management, focusing on driving scientific innovation and production-grade capabilities for customer content organization and creation.
Agentic AIApplication Performance ManagementArtificial Intelligence (AI)Business DevelopmentDevOpsInformation ServicesInformation TechnologyManagement Information SystemsNetwork SecuritySoftware
Responsibilities
Set the science strategy for multimodal AI across ODSP, spanning vision, vision‑language, and generative models for personal and enterprise content
Lead end‑to‑end model development: Data strategy, training/evaluation, safety and robustness, online experimentation, reliability, and performance; land results in production with engineering partners
Advance multimodal foundation models: Adapt/align large vision and vision‑language models (e.g., diffusion/transformer stacks) for consumer‑grade scenarios with enterprise‑grade privacy, permissions, and compliance
Drive retrieval + generation quality: Design permission‑aware embeddings and metadata‑rich indexing; develop hybrid systems that combine discriminative and generative components for superior UX and efficiency
Own evaluation at scale: Define offline/online metrics for recognition, retrieval, and generative quality (semantic fidelity, aesthetic quality, safety, latency/cost), and run A/B experiments that connect to product goals
Ship responsibly: Incorporate content safety, fairness, transparency, and privacy‑by‑design; collaborate with Responsible AI and legal/privacy teams to meet Microsoft and regional requirements
Mentor and multiply: Coach scientists/engineers, raise the quality bar for methods and code, and cultivate a strong research‑to‑production culture in ODSP
Communicate and influence: Author technical documents and demos; present to leaders and partner teams; contribute patents and, where appropriate, publications and community engagement
Qualification
Required
Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 5+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR equivalent experience
Expertise in vision and vision‑language modeling (e.g., contrastive pretraining, image/video transformers, diffusion/latent diffusion, instruction‑tuning, alignment, and evaluation)
Experience turning open research into production features at scale (data pipelines, training, evals, rollout, monitoring, incident response, performance/cost optimization)
Experience designing evaluation methodologies for both discriminative (accuracy/recall) and generative quality (human+auto evals, safety, preference modeling) and running online experiments at scale
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role
Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter
Preferred
Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
OR equivalent experience
3+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker
7+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings)
5+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team
7+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping
Experience with photo libraries or consumer imaging products (clustering, duplicate detection, moments/memories, semantic search, enhancement, creative tooling)
Expertise in retrieval‑augmented or hybrid systems for vision and vision language models, including embedding design, approximate nearest neighbor search, and metadata/ranking for personal content scenarios
Background in content safety for images/video, red‑teaming, and model alignment for consumer contexts
Contributions to top venues (CVPR/ICCV/NeurIPS/ICLR, etc.) and a portfolio of shipped features, patents, or open‑source artifacts
Ability to collaborate across disciplines and utilize technical leadership skills; ability to set direction, make pragmatic trade‑offs, and land outcomes with partner teams
Company
Microsoft
Microsoft is a software corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Microsoft has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
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Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (9192)
2024 (9343)
2023 (7677)
2022 (11403)
2021 (7210)
2020 (7852)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$1MKey Investors
Technology Venture Investors
2022-12-09Post Ipo Equity
1986-03-13IPO
1981-09-01Series Unknown· $1M
Leadership Team
Satya Nadella
Chairman and CEO
Vukani Mngxati
Chief Executive Officer - Microsft South Africa
Recent News
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