Role overview
Microsoft is a company where passionate innovators come to collaborate, envision what can be and take their careers to levels they cannot achieve anywhere else. This is a world of more possibilities, more innovation, more openness in a cloud-enabled world. The Business and Industry Copilots group is a rapidly growing organization that is responsible for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of products, Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse, AI Builder, Microsoft Industry Solution and more. Microsoft is considered one of the leaders in Software as a Service in the world of business applications and this organization is at the heart of how business applications are designed and delivered.
This is an exciting time to join our group and work on something strategic to Microsoft. Microsoft Dataverse and the Power Platform Managed Platform provide secure, scalable, and cost-efficient foundations for building AI-powered, governed, and compliant applications at global scale. This team builds platform capabilities and microservices that deliver global scale, security, governance, and managed runtime for customers across Power Platform. You will be part of a team of engineers who thrive on solving complex problems at scale with impeccable quality.
We are looking for a Principal Research Engineer to join the Managed Platform team, which provides the foundation for global scale, security, governance, and compliance across Power Platform and Dataverse. In this role, you will apply data science techniques to improve platform reliability, optimize performance, and enable AI-driven insights that shape the future of enterprise applications.
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
- Build collaborative relationships with product and business groups to deliver AI-driven impact
- Research and implement state-of-the-art using foundation models, prompt engineering, RAG, graphs, multi-agent architectures, as well as classical machine learning techniques.
- Fine-tune foundation models using domain-specific datasets. - Evaluate model behavior on relevance, bias, hallucination, and response quality via offline evaluations, shadow experiments, online experiments, and ROI analysis.
- Build rapid AI solution prototypes, contribute to production deployment of these solutions, debug production code, support MLOps/AIOps. Contribute to papers, patents, and conference presentations. - Translate research into production-ready solutions and measure their impact through A/B testing and telemetry that address customer needs.
- Ability to use data to identify gaps in AI quality, uncover insights and implement PoCs to show proof of concepts.
- Demonstrate deep expertise in AI subfields (e.g., deep learning, Generative AI, NLP, muti-modal models) to translate cutting-edge research into practical, real-world solutions that drive product innovation and business impact.
- Share insights on industry trends and applied technologies with engineering and product teams.
- Apply a deep understanding of fairness and bias in AI by proactively identifying and mitigating ethical and security risks—including XPIA (Cross-Prompt Injection Attack) unfairness, bias, and privacy concerns—to ensure equitable and responsible outcomes.
- 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.
- 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.
- 5+ years experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers).
- Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
- Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.
Preferred qualifications
- Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
- + OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.
- OR equivalent experience.
- 5+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
- 3+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team.
- 3+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.
- 2+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.