Principal Applied Scientist - CoreAI

Microsoft’s Enterprise customers have a challenge – they need the tools to build agentic experiences over public and private knowledge. The Azure AI Knowledge team is leading the way to deliver the next chapter of agentic retrieval through Foundry IQ   Knowledge bases  to bring together many sources of structured and unstructured enterprise data and transform it into knowledge. We are continuously developing and deploying new capabilities to meet the demands of complex queries that require reasoning and reflection to deliver high quality results. Our customers span many different industries, corpus sizes and scenarios, and our work includes multiple aspects, such as:  Developing LLM prompts, agents and query execution workflows, often with tight latency constraints  Collection, generation and filtering of training and evaluation data Building off state of the art techniques from across Microsoft and the industry Use of AI coding patterns to parallelize and accelerate experimentation   You can follow our progression from better search, to RAG, to agentic retrieval:  Azure AI Search: Outperforming vector search with hybrid retrieval and ranking capabilities – Microsoft Community Hub    Raising the bar for RAG excellence: introducing generative query rewriting and new ranking model   Up to 40% better relevance for complex queries with new agentic retrieval engine   Foundry IQ: boost response relevance by 36% with agentic retrieval | Microsoft Community Hub   Foundry IQ: Improve recall by up to 54% with knowledge bases | Microsoft Community Hub     As a team, we leverage the diverse backgrounds and experiences of passionate engineers, scientists, and program managers to help us realize our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We believe great products are built by inclusive teams of customer-obsessed individuals who trust each other and work closely together.  We collaborate regularly across the company with teams like M365, Bing and Microsoft Research. A major aspect of this role is to push our development of knowledge retrieval to the frontier. This requires a capable individual who can leverage multiple coding agents to explore new techniques (autoresearch, claws, CLI systems, etc) and bring them to production at scale.  If you are passionate about working on the latest and hottest areas in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and data science, all the while making search better for customers across the world, then this is the team you’re looking for!

Lead state of the art research incorporation into techniques shipped to production.  Proactively develop and build metrics to use across the full range of search engine components.  Seek out and incorporate customer feedback into dataset construction, evaluation, and technique development.  Lead technical excellence and contribute to experimentation infrastructure and proofs-of-concept using AI coding agents.  Advances the quality of the team’s experimental codebase to ensure experiments are efficient and repeatable.   Nurtures collaborative relationships with product management, engineers, and other functions across products.  Drive clear and efficient plans, documents, and communication  Qualifications Required Qualifications: Bachelor'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 Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent