Applied AI Engineer II

Microsoft • Redmond, WA

10h

About The Position

Overview
Project Sophia is a new generation business application, built ground up from market-disruptive, AI-first product principles. The product has been designed to completely re-define how complex, cross domain business problems are solved. Every interaction, every component and every user experience has been designed leveraging the full power and potential of generative AI and is taking the notion of AI based experiences way beyond the standard AI chat experiences.
Multi-modal concepts, combined with an emphasis of visual appeal and ease of use, is empowering any business user to interact with an infinite, AI Powered Business Research canvas where users can explore and resolve any business question both within and across business domains. Powered by large language models and deep business domain expertise, Project Sophia will empower the user to build out research journeys, automatically suggesting relevant data sources and correlating insights, intelligently visualizing exploration outcomes and suggesting next actions in the research journey. Project Sophia represents the new way of doing business, enabling strategic business decision making in a fraction of the time – filling a gap in the market where no app exists today.
As we advance our product journey, we are innovating and iterating at a rapid pace. To further accelerate our momentum by bringing agentic, AI-powered experiences to the business application space and transforming how people work we continue to expand our investments in generative AI capabilities.
The Team
We are a small, but very dynamic and passionate team that fully embrace the build-measure-learn iterative development approach. We work towards the common goal of building a product customers love. As a natural part of our product design and development process we are working very closely with customers as well as listening to telemetry and other key signals which allow us to consistently evolve based on customer demand and adoption patterns. Deep collaboration across PM, Design, Engineering, and Science is a given and all disciplines play important roles as part of the product development process.
In Sophia’s user experience team, we are committed to building the best-in-class AI experiences to gain insight into strategic business questions. We foster a culture of diversity, collaboration, and innovation, valuing everyone's unique perspectives and contributions. Our agile, start-up-like environment encourages out-of-the-box thinking and empowers each team member to contribute towards our shared mission of delivering a highly innovative, agentic, AI powered user experience that is positioned to fundamentally change what business applications look like in the future.
The Candidate Profile & Role
As an Applied AI Engineer II on the team, you will apply both software engineering and AI expertise to design and implement intelligent solutions and end-to-end experiences for Sophia. You’ll collaborate with business and technology leaders, internal users, and partners to build scalable, production-ready systems that leverage AI to solve complex business requests. In this role, you are expected to bring software engineering fundamental architecture, coding, testing, and deployment— while pioneering AI-centric UI and delivering unique experiences that differentiate Sophia in the market.
We are seeking individuals who are customer-focused, passionate, creative, and collaborative. If you have a proven track record of delivering delightful experiences and are motivated by our mission to innovate in AI-driven UI and deliver novel experiences, we encourage you to apply. Joining Project Sophia offers a unique opportunity to work on something highly strategic to Microsoft and be at the cutting edge of innovation. We provide opportunities for professional development, mentorship, and career advancement within our dynamic and fast-paced environment.
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.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 2+ 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 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field OR equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role.
• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

• 2+ years of extensive experience with one or more modern web technologies such as .NET / Node / React / Angular, building RESTful APIs
• 2+ years of solid experience in an OO Language like C# or Java or Python
• 1+ years of professional experience working with generative artificial intelligence, large language models, or agent-based systems.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent or 5+ years of industry experience.
• Excellence in one or more general programming languages including but not limited to: Python, C#; JavaScript; TypeScript.
• Comfortable driving complex server & client architecture across large product teams.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLM evaluation techniques, including LLM-as-a-Judge, agentic evaluations, and RAG assessments.
• A track record of delivering successful, large-scale applied ML projects in an industry setting.
• Experience with MLOps practices, including model versioning, automated testing, monitoring, and CI/CD for machine learning.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Skilled in building and operating infrastructure using Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, and deploying containerized models with Docker, Kubernetes, or similar tools.
• Experience with proficient coding, debugging, and problem-solving skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and ship AI-first product capabilities end-to-end from rapid prototype to production, spanning LLM-powered services, retrieval/grounding pipelines, and intelligent UX experiences that delight users through Sophia’s AI canvas.
• Own implementation across the full stack integrating front-end experiences, back-end services, and AI orchestration layers that connect models, context, and tools to deliver cohesive, extensible, high-performance systems.
• Collaborate with design, research, and platform teams to adapt or fine-tune LLMs/SLMs and multimodal models for real-world customer scenarios, ensuring outcomes are contextual, transparent, and human-centered.
• Build agentic, tool-using, and multimodal workflows that reason across data and services; optimize for safety, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Contribute to engineering excellence secure-by-design, accessibility compliance, automated testing, and code craftsmanship across the product lifecycle.
• Instrument and evaluate AI features with telemetry, experimentation, and continuous feedback loops to refine reasoning quality and user experience.
• Drive live-site reliability and operational excellence, participating in On-Call rotations while maintaining a sustainable, high-ownership engineering culture.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level