Senior Applied Science Lead

Conversational commerce introduces challenges that differ from traditional web shopping. Preferences emerge through dialogue, expectations for accuracy and trust are high, and systems must reason over context and frequently changing commerce data.

Microsoft Copilot is building shopping experiences that are conversational, proactive, and trustworthy. As a Senior Applied Science Lead, you will be hands on and lead the development of machine learning and generative AI systems that power product discovery, ranking, personalization, and reasoning across Copilot, Bing and Edge Shopping surfaces. This role sits at the intersection of applied machine learning, generative AI, and product experience, with clear ownership of core shopping intelligence used directly in user-facing experiences.

Microsoft’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.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and productionize machine learning models for product discovery, ranking, recommendation, and personalization using large-scale commerce and behavioral data.
• Develop LLM-based systems for conversational shopping, including prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation, tool orchestration, and grounding against structured commerce data.
• Address quality and trust challenges such as hallucination risk, stale data, and recommendation reliability.
• Define evaluation frameworks and experimentation strategies for conversational and proactive shopping scenarios, including offline metrics and online experiments.
• Partner closely with product, engineering, and design teams to translate models into low-latency, reliable Copilot experiences.
• Provide technical leadership for applied science within Copilot Shopping through design reviews, mentoring, and setting quality standards.
• Contribute to model governance and Responsible AI practices to ensure trustworthy and compliant systems.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Bachelor'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 Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.
• Hands on Machine Learning experience.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• 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 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of people management experience.
• 3+ years experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers).
• Experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
• 3+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
• 1+ year(s) experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team.
• 1+ year(s) experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.

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.