Senior Applied Scientist

Overview

Imagine the possibilities when AI is infused into the core of Microsoft Word—an application people use every day to share ideas, shape them with others, and turn them into reality. Join the Word Mobile and Word Copilot team in Noida to help transform how people create, edit, understand, and collaborate on documents across phones, tablets, web, and desktop.

You will work on experiences ranging from the foundational capabilities of a world-class word processor to new conversational and agentic ways of writing, including mobile-first Copilot entry points, direct rewriting from a selection, contextual suggestions, and multi-turn document creation and refinement.

As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will develop and evaluate models, prompts, retrieval strategies, and intelligent experiences that connect natural-language interaction with the Word canvas. You will help Copilot use Work IQ to reason over the files, meetings, emails, chats, people, and organizational context a user is permitted to access, producing grounded and relevant results with enterprise security and governance built in.

In a startup-like, customer-focused environment, you will partner with product, design, engineering, Microsoft Research, and teams across Word and Microsoft 365, learn from customer feedback and product telemetry, and ship resilient AI capabilities at global scale while accounting for mobile constraints such as limited screen space, latency, intermittent connectivity, and fast task completion.

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

• Develop and improve AI models, prompting strategies, retrieval pipelines, and evaluation methods for Word Mobile and Word Copilot scenarios spanning document creation, authoring, comprehension, editing, and collaboration.
• Design grounded experiences that use Work IQ signals—including documents, meetings, emails, chats, people, and organizational context—while respecting permissions, security, compliance, and responsible AI requirements.
• Build mobile-first Copilot experiences for drafting, rewriting, summarizing, explaining, structuring, and refining content, while preserving the precision, trust, and rich document semantics expected from a world-class word processor.
• Partner with engineering, product, and design teams across Word and Microsoft 365 to integrate, flight, monitor, and maintain models and agent capabilities across iOS, Android, web, and desktop surfaces, including features and dependencies that span teams and geographies.
• Create rigorous offline and online evaluations for quality, grounding, safety, latency, reliability, and user satisfaction; investigate failures through solid problem-solving and debugging practices and translate findings into model and product improvements.
• Use customer feedback, product telemetry, service monitoring, and experimentation results to identify emerging authoring needs, validate hypotheses, and prioritize high-impact improvements for Word and mobile workflows.
• Communicate scientific insights clearly, contribute to design and architecture reviews, grow shared team knowledge, influence cross-functional decisions, and create reusable methods, publications, patents, or technical artifacts where appropriate.

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.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, machine learning, or applied research).
• OR Master's Degree in a related field AND 7+ years related experience.
• OR Doctorate in a related field AND 6+ years related experience.
• OR equivalent experience.
• Solid programming skills in Python and hands-on experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Experience developing, adapting, or evaluating large language models, multimodal models, retrieval-augmented systems, or agentic AI applications.
• Demonstrated success translating applied research into reliable production services, including experimentation, evaluation, debugging, and performance optimization.
• Publication record or significant industry impact in natural language processing, multimodal AI, human-AI interaction, information retrieval, or machine learning.
• Experience building grounded AI systems over enterprise or user-context data, including retrieval quality, citations, permission-aware access, safety, and responsible AI considerations.
• Experience with mobile or cross-platform product constraints, online experimentation, telemetry analysis, and quality measurement for customer-facing AI experiences.
• Solid collaboration and technical leadership skills, with a growth mindset, customer focus, and commitment to inclusive product development.

Additional information

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.