Overview

Are you looking for an opportunity to solve business-critical problems for both Fortune 500 companies and startups globally, using cutting-edge AI and ML technology? Do you enjoy tackling technical challenges and producing innovative solutions to real-world problems? Then come join Microsoft’s AI Applied Engineering team. You will work alongside the industry’s best AI/ML engineering, data science, and product talent, engaging with some of the largest, most innovative customers and ISVs in the world.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI applications are explosive growth areas in technology, transforming every business in every industry. In this golden age of AI, Microsoft is committed to bringing state-of-the-art technologies to customers in a responsible, secure, and scalable manner. Innovations in AI are helping enterprises fundamentally reshape their business, and Microsoft is a key player and market leader in this space.

The AI Applied Engineering team (part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization) acts as a forward-deployed AI task force and is hiring for a Senior Forward Deployed Scientist - CoreAI.

Our mission is to co-innovate, incubate, and improve Microsoft’s AI platforms by applying them to real-world customer scenarios. We build and infuse AI technologies into end-to-end solutions for strategic enterprise customers and ISVs across all domains. Using Azure AI services like LLMs, Speech, Search and advanced techniques like model Fine Tuning, Evaluations along with Azure’s cloud infrastructure, we deliver AI-powered APIs, models, services and solutions that solve real-world problems. Insights from these projects directly inform and enhance Microsoft’s core AI platform, making our products more robust and scalable for all customers.  

We’re moving at startup speed but with the resources of one of the world’s largest companies – it's the best of all worlds.

Responsibilities

Build world class AI and ML solutions for our customers and partners involving GenAI, AI Agents, and fine-tuned and off-the-shelf models.
Build complete, highly performant, intelligent, AI models and solutions (requires ML DevOps experience and building ML frameworks for evaluation, benchmarking, and testing of Agentic AI solutions).
Drive the adoption of Agentic AI by developing bespoke AI solutions for top Microsoft customers.
Lead the vision, strategy, and execution of innovative solutions that leverage our latest AI Foundry Agentic AI, models, and tools capabilities.
Leverage technical skills to architect state-of-the-art solutions that address our customers' business needs, meet their technical requirements, and provide a high degree of reliability and safety
Collaborate with other engineering teams, researchers, and Field engineers to help enterprise customers incorporate cutting-edge AI Foundry platform into their robust end-to-end systems. Drive learnings from customer engagements into improving AI Foundry platform and helping build solution accelerators.
Play a critical role in identifying opportunities to innovate and differentiate AI Foundry, while maintaining our best-in-class safety standards.
Excellent communication skills to explain and demonstrate complex solutions persuasively to technical and non-technical audiences alike.
Act as the primary technical advisor for prospective customers evaluating Agents and Azure Direct Foundry models.
Demonstrate how we can address the customer's use cases through proofs of concept.
Provide technical guidance on integration and deployment best practices.
Partner closely with account executives to understand customer requirements.
Configure AI Foundry's capabilities to showcase how it meets the customer's needs, and develop customized pilots and prototypes, as well as evaluation suites to make the case for customer adoption.
Travel occasionally to customer sites for workshops, implementation support, and building relationships. Establish a shared vision for creating solutions that enable beneficial and safe AI.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications: 

Doctorate in relevant field
- OR Master's Degree in relevant field AND 3+ years related research experience
  - OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 4+ years related research experience
    - OR equivalent experience.

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

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/Additional Qualifications:

3+ years of experience with software design and development using general purpose programming language (Python/Java/C# etc.) and knowledge of data pipelines
1+ year of related research experience with AI/ML techniques and tools (e.g., LLM fine-tuning, prompt engineering, benchmarking and evaluations of models and agentic solutions)
Experience in dealing with ambiguity, and handling changes in customer requirements

Research Sciences IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $158,400 - $258,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.