Applied Scientist II

Job description

The Web Search and AI is an engineering and science group that is responsible for search quality in the Bing Web index, including the data representation, machine learning and metrics definition work, as well as developing the search stack end to end. Also, with products such as Cortana and other bots, the group develops the artificial intelligence platform and models for using deep learning and related technologies, across Microsoft products.

Within in that group, the Web &AI Sciences is a small team of applied scientists, working on a variety of measurement and machine learning projects, particularly projects that enable a new scenario or product capability. This work is highly collaborative, working with the larger Web Search and AI group and other groups across Microsoft, including Microsoft Research. The work usually involves prediction and/or analysis, with a focus that leads to not only production improvements but patents and research papers. Current example projects are metrics for conversational information retrieval, and deep learning for document ranking.

We seek innovative and highly motivated applied scientists to help us continue our quest to delight users with the best information seeking experience.

Strong practical and theoretical knowledge of information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing and data mining techniques will be a big plus. Candidates should also be interested in innovation and shipping high quality software services at scale.

As a part of our team, you will work on emergent research areas: assessing, contributing to, and incorporating state of the art techniques to the ever-developing areas of Bing’s search quality. You must have the ability to build or adapt technology to serve your projects and experiments, and be effective at participating in broader projects in Web & AI Sciences and beyond.

You will be asked to take on some big challenges.   Specifically, you’ll invest your time in three key areas:

1. Carrying out applied research activities to identify new ways to improve user experience when interacting with information search, recommendation and retrieval systems. Such research may include both web search result relevance and user experience

2. Working as part of the team to convert these ideas into detailed analyses, proof of concepts, demos, user-facing experiments, and eventually shipped features in Microsoft products

3. Collaborating within and outside the Web Search & AI group in these research and development activities

Requirements:

• Master’s degree in computer science or a relevant field and at least 2 years of relevant work experience. PhD preferred.

• 3+ years of machine learning, data processing, data analysis, data mining, natural language processing or information retrieval experience

• 3+ years of experience working with any of the following languages: C#, Python, or R

• 3+ years of experience working with Hadoop or Spark

• Publications in major conferences and/or journals in an area such as information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, data mining. Example: NIPS, ICML, KDD, WWW, CIKM, WSDM

• A willingness to learn, share, and improve

• Superior verbal, visual and written communication skills

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, national origin or ancestry, age, disability, marital status, pregnancy, protected veteran status, protected genetic information, political affiliation, or any other characteristics protected by local laws, regulations, or ordinances.