Principal Applied Scientist

Viva Engage connects people through communities, bringing leaders and employees together to share knowledge, clarify priorities, build culture and relationships.   Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) is the premier tool to create multi-directional dialogue between tens of millions of employees worldwide every month.  

Engage team members are at the forefront of driving AI applications and copilot adoption to make communication and information sharing easy and authentic. Our work supports top challenges for our customers, spreading shared knowledge, including digital safety, trusted security standards, and deep analytics to help our customers maximize reach, reduce inefficiencies, and create a thriving organizational culture. We would love to have you join the team driving innovation, connection, and community for our valued global customers. #VivaEngage  

About this Job 
As a Principal Applied Scientist at Viva Engage, your role is to build Agentic applications across our product, predictive models that connect individuals with each other and knowledge across organizations. Our focus lies in discovery, recommendations, relevance and grounding for features across Viva Engage, leveraging data from our platform and across Office 365. 

What makes this role special? 
This role presents an opportunity to create a vision around the Viva Engage Agentic Applications, the underlying platform and help us make it a reality. Our tight-knit, high-performing team, coupled with the unique challenges posed by social enterprise analytics, will offer plenty of opportunities for impact. 

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.  

• Design, build, and ship machine learning and LLM-driven capabilities that directly power AI features in Viva Engage, with clear product KPIs (e.g., activation, retention, engagement, moderation quality, time saved).
• Own end-to-end delivery of applied science solutions: problem framing → data/labels → modeling/prompting → evaluation → experimentation (A/B tests) → deployment → monitoring → iteration.
• Develop and operationalize AI agents for knowledge discovery, moderation, communities, and events—focused on measurable user value, automation, and high-quality recommendations.
• Work with large, complex datasets to solve ambiguous, non-routine product problems using advanced statistical and ML methods, prioritizing approaches that are production-viable.
• Utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) for advanced text analysis and natural language understanding tasks, enabling deeper connections and knowledge sharing across organizations.
• Leverage generative AI techniques to enhance data augmentation and predictive capabilities, further improving recommendations and personalized user experiences.
• Develop deep product intuition to influence future product roadmaps and drive decision-making by making pragmatic tradeoffcs between model quality, engineering complexity, and time-to-value.
• Collaborate with product and engineering to craft experiments and test hypotheses.
• Communicate clearly across disciplines: translate complex technical decisions into product implications, risks, and expected outcomes.
• Operate effectively in complex, cross-team environments and drive alignment through technical leadership and execution.

Hands On Expectations:

• This is a hands-on applied science engineering role: you will write production-quality code, prototype quickly, and implement your own solutions (not just analyses, papers, or slide decks).
• You will contribute directly in areas such as Python/TypeScript/Java services or pipelines, Prompt/Agent orchestration, Evaluation harnesses, Experimentation instrumentation, and model/agent monitoring.
• Success is defined by shipped features and measurable product impact.

In this role/team you will have:

• Autonomy and freedom to innovate—paired with accountability to deliver customer-facing outcomes collaborating with PM/Eng/UX as necessary.
• The ability to choose from best-in-class open source and Microsoft technology to ship reliably at scale.
• A strong experimentation culture: offline eval + online A/B testing to make data-driven decisions.
• An opportunity for outsized impact as part of a small but mighty team on a rapidly growing product needed now more than ever.

• Bachelor'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 Master'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 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.

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: