{"id":3185802,"url":"https://alion.io/job/microsoft-principal-applied-scientist-copilot-quality","title":"Principal Applied Scientist - Copilot Quality","company":{"id":18,"name":"Microsoft","domain":"microsoft.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/microsoft","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Eightfold","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":363,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.689,"repost_share":0.003,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Washington, United States","Mountain View, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":165600,"max":296400,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":296400},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":true},{"name":"Reward Modeling","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-21T21:16:37Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-23","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T10:23:26Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":8,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":8},"description":"OverviewMicrosoft Copilot is driving the next generation of Copilot experiences used by millions of people every day. As a member of the Copilot organization, you will define and drive the strategy, technical roadmap, and execution required to make Copilot the most trusted, capable, and continuously improving AI assistant for work and life.\nOur mission is make Copilot the best AI for work by turning every meaningful customer signal into lasting product improvement. This means building a quality system that identifies success and failures, represents real-world usage, determines the highest-value opportunities, and verify improvements reach customers safely and reliably - with machine learning at its core.\nWe are seeking an experienced, Principal Applied Scientist leader who can elevate our quality systems, shape technical and product direction, and lead high-impact teams operating across evaluation, experimentation, production intelligence, AI safety, reliability, customer feedback, and product improvement. This role will establish a shared quality bar across Copilot experiences and accelerate the loop from customer signal to diagnosis, evaluation, improvement, and verified product impact.\nMicrosoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.\nResponsibilities\nBuild trusted measures of quality\nDevelop online and offline metrics, representative evaluation datasets, human and AI-assisted labeling approaches, and benchmarks grounded in real customer tasks.\n\nValidate that quality measures are statistically sound, sensitive to meaningful changes, and predictive of customer outcomes.\n\nTurn signals into improvements\nIdentify high-impact failure modes across Copilot experiences and use data, evaluations, and customer feedback to understand their root causes.\n\nImprove quality through hill-climbing approaches such as post-training, retrieval and ranking, prompting, orchestration, and product changes.\n\nDesign experiments that distinguish promising offline results from improvements customers actually experience.\n\nExperimentation and Release Quality\nEstablish rigorous A/B experimentation, quality gates, regression protection, and rollout criteria that connect offline gains with improvements in satisfaction, task success, engagement, retention, latency, reliability, safety, and cost.\n\nCreate operating mechanisms that rapidly resolve quality tradeoffs, dependencies, and release risks.\n\nQualifications\nRequired Qualifications:\nBachelor'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)\nOR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 5+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)\nOR equivalent experience. \n\nPreferred Qualifications:\nAdvanced degree (MS or PhD) in a relevant technical discipline. \nExperience improving large language models, AI assistants, agents, or other large-scale AI products. \nAbility to operate in a fast-paced, research-driven environment while maintaining high technical standards. \nPassion for advancing human-aligned AI and staying at the forefront of emerging model-training technologies. \nDemonstrated commitment to inclusive leadership, talent development, and fostering a culture where teams do the best work of their careers. \nSignificant experience building, evaluating, or improving production ML or AI systems. \nDemonstrated expertise in at least one relevant area, such as large-model evaluation, deep learning, post-training, reward modeling, reinforcement learning, retrieval, or ranking. \nExperience designing rigorous metrics or experiments and using results to guide technical and product decisions. \n#CAP #Copilot\nApplied Sciences IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $165,600 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 per year.\nCertain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:\nhttps://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay\nThis position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.\nMicrosoft 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. 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