Principal Applied AI Engineer: Microsoft

This role is within Microsoft's Business & Industry Copilots (BIC) group, the organization responsible for products like the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and the Power Platform. The team is at the forefront of digital transformation, enabling organizations to build Copilots with state-of-the-art AI solutions.

As a Principal Applied AI Engineer, you will be a senior individual contributor and thought leader with deep expertise in large language models (LLMs), reinforcement learning, and agentic AI architectures. You will operate at the frontier of AI science and product innovation, driving the design and deployment of next-generation AI systems at scale, and partnering with research teams to deliver joint solutions.

Important Notes
Starting January 26, 2026, employees are expected to work from the office at least four days per week.

This position requires passing the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire and every two years thereafter.

Responsibilities
Drive the design and deployment of next-generation AI systems at scale.

Design and build systems that allow LLMs to reason over large amounts of data.

Leverage lighter-weight models for specific scenarios to optimize performance.

Work closely with research teams to deliver joint solutions, from building fine-tuned models to creating custom LLMs for specific product needs.

Requirements
Required Qualifications:

A Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (Statistics, CS, Engineering) with 6+ years of experience, OR a Master's degree with 4+ years of experience, OR a Doctorate with 3+ years of experience.

2+ years of experience with transformer-based models (e.g., GPT, Llama).

2+ years of experience in coding and design for AI models in scaled production services.

2+ years of experience shipping applied research to production.

Preferred Qualifications:

A Doctorate with 10+ years of related experience or a significant publication record.

Deep expertise in one or more of the following: supervised learning, deep learning, NLP, reinforcement learning, computer vision, or agentic systems.

6+ years of experience programming with C#.

Experience with applications or domain adaptation of Foundation Models (e.g., fine-tuning LLMs).