Senior Principal Applied Scientist

The ODSP Applied Science team is hiring a senior principal‑level applied scientist to lead breakthrough work in multimodal AI and generative scenarios across OneDrive and SharePoint. This is a senior individual contributor role with significant technical leadership responsibilities and a strong potential to transition into people management in the near term. You will drive scientific innovation and production‑grade capabilities that transform how hundreds of millions of customers organize, search, and create their content -securely and responsibly. 

You will collaborate closely with product, design, and engineering teams across ODSP, including the OneDrive Photos team, to deliver experiences powered by vision, language, and generative AI - all to delight customers and build a best-in-industry product for customers' photo and video needs. Example scenarios include intelligent photo organization, semantic search, captioning and summarization, memory experiences that help customers relive cherished moments, creative generation, and safety/appropriateness controls. This is a hands‑on leadership role with broad technical impact and high visibility. 

• Set the science strategy for multimodal AI across ODSP, spanning vision, vision‑language, and generative models for personal and enterprise content.
• Lead end‑to‑end model development: Data strategy, training/evaluation, safety and robustness, online experimentation, reliability, and performance; land results in production with engineering partners.
• Advance multimodal foundation models: Adapt/align large vision and vision‑language models (e.g., diffusion/transformer stacks) for consumer‑grade scenarios with enterprise‑grade privacy, permissions, and compliance.
• Drive retrieval + generation quality: Design permission‑aware embeddings and metadata‑rich indexing; develop hybrid systems that combine discriminative and generative components for superior UX and efficiency.
• Own evaluation at scale: Define offline/online metrics for recognition, retrieval, and generative quality (semantic fidelity, aesthetic quality, safety, latency/cost), and run A/B experiments that connect to product goals.
• Ship responsibly: Incorporate content safety, fairness, transparency, and privacy‑by‑design; collaborate with Responsible AI and legal/privacy teams to meet Microsoft and regional requirements. Mentor and multiply:
• Coach scientists/engineers, raise the quality bar for methods and code, and cultivate a strong research‑to‑production culture in ODSP.
• Communicate and influence: Author technical documents and demos; present to leaders and partner teams; contribute patents and, where appropriate, publications and community engagement. 

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor'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) 
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 5+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) 
  • OR equivalent experience. Expertise in vision and vision‑language modeling (e.g., contrastive pretraining, image/video transformers, diffusion/latent diffusion, instruction‑tuning, alignment, and evaluation).
• Experience turning open research into production features at scale (data pipelines, training, evals, rollout, monitoring, incident response, performance/cost optimization).
• Experience designing evaluation methodologies for both discriminative (accuracy/recall) and generative quality (human+auto evals, safety, preference modeling) and running online experiments at scale.

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.

• Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) 
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 3+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
• 7+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
• 5+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team.
• 7+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping. Experience with photo libraries or consumer imaging products (clustering, duplicate detection, moments/memories, semantic search, enhancement, creative tooling).
• Expertise in retrieval‑augmented or hybrid systems for vision and vision language models, including embedding design, approximate nearest neighbor search, and metadata/ranking for personal content scenarios.
• Background in content safety for images/video, red‑teaming, and model alignment for consumer contexts.
• Contributions to top venues (CVPR/ICCV/NeurIPS/ICLR, etc.) and a portfolio of shipped features, patents, or open‑source artifacts.
• Ability to collaborate across disciplines and utilize technical leadership skills; ability to set direction, make pragmatic trade‑offs, and land outcomes with partner teams. 
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Applied Sciences IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $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.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

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.