The Time and Places team at Microsoft is looking to redefine how people organize, schedule, and collaborate through intelligent calendar and meeting experiences by building AI-powered solutions that enhance productivity, leveraging deep data science, large language model (LLM) integration, and telemetry-driven insights.
Requirements
- Experience developing and deploying large language models (LLMs), including agentic systems, supervised fine-tuning, and Reinforcement Learning (RLHF)
- Experience designing, implementing, and optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and advanced context engineering.
- Hands-on experience with modern LLM evaluation techniques, including LLM-as-a-Judge, agentic evaluations, and RAG assessments.
- Deep understanding of fundamental ML algorithms (supervised, unsupervised) and modern neural network architectures.
- Experience with MLOps practices, including model versioning, automated testing, monitoring, and CI/CD for machine learning.
- A record of publication in top-tier scientific venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, KDD).
- Ability to translate complex ML concepts into business value and communicate technical insights to non-technical stakeholders.
Responsibilities
- Lead applied research projects that advance the state-of-the-art in GenAI and directly impact Microsoft's core productivity products.
- Collaborate closely with product, engineering, and design teams to translate research breakthroughs into practical, high-value applications.
- Serve as a bridge between research and product, effectively communicating complex concepts and project progress to ensure stakeholder alignment.
- Mentor colleagues and champion research best practices, sharing your expertise in state-of-the-art machine learning techniques.
- Work iteratively in a research environment, developing new hypotheses and demonstrating the ability to learn from unexpected or ambiguous outcomes.
- Share research findings through publications, presentations, and internal forums to influence both the scientific community and internal product strategy.
- Effectively communicate with product leaders (and often MSR researchers) throughout the planning and execution of applied research projects, which often involves learning and teaching complex concepts.
Other
- Candidates who are creative, self-driven, curious, people-oriented and comfortable defining a path through ambiguity towards high-level goals.
- 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.
- 1+ year(s) experience creating publications (e.g., patents, peer-reviewed academic papers).
- Experience delivering successful, large-scale applied ML projects in an industry setting.
