Research Engineer II

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

About The Position

As a Research Engineer in the Power Platform Managed Transformation Team, you’ll play a pivotal role in delivering our mission: enabling organizations to adopt and scale AI agents with measurable business impact, unified governance, and actionable insights. You’ll collaborate with experts across governance, analytics, and platform services to drive innovation in Copilot and Copilot Studio scenarios, helping customers realize the full potential of AI-powered agents. We are looking for an Research Engineer II to join our team! Join us in shaping the future of AI agents. This opportunity will allow you to: Accelerate your career growth in applied AI and agentic systems. Develop deep business expertise in enterprise-scale AI adoption. Hone your skills in designing, evaluating, and scaling intelligent agent 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. The team consists of Applied Scientists and Engineers partnering regularly with Product Managers and Designers. Our team works in an agile start-up like environment where we expect each team member to think out of the box to contribute and collaborate towards the mission of the team. As part of this team, you would get to work on novel experiences & cutting edge technologies across a variety of platforms to build the next generation application development experiences.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR
Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python - OR
Equivalent experience.
1+ years' hands on experience with AI/LLM (Large Language Modeling)
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: 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

Experience working on successful applied research projects in industry environments .
Experience programming with Python, Typescript, C# (any) is preferred.
An applicant with the following skills or relevant experience would be a plus: -
Applications of Foundation Models, Domain Adaptation of Foundation Models (e.g. fine-tuning LLMs/SLMs)
Vision, Audio, and Multimodal Foundation Models
Agentic Systems
Prompt Tuning
Natural Language Processing
Human-AI Interaction.

Responsibilities

Conduct applied research to develop innovative AI and machine learning models that address real-world challenges.
Lead end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning models, from prototyping and implementation to evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
Create and adapt novel training and fine-tuning algorithms for language models.
Bring research projects to successful completion yielding new algorithms, prototypes, theories, tools, methods, analyses, insights, or collections of data which solve one or more open research problems.
Operate and support 24X7 usage of AI Models by customers
Document and share best practices across the organization.
Supports mentorship by assisting with onboarding of research interns or other team members.
Stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in AI and machine learning, and apply new techniques to solve complex problems.
Embody our Culture and Values

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