Senior Applied Science Lead

Overview

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

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.