Are you seeking opportunities at the intersection of large-scale language technologies and responsible AI? Do you want to be a member of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, data & applied scientists, and software engineers? Do you embrace complex sociotechnical challenges? Microsoft Research is looking to hire an applied scientist for a new initiative on the fairness of large-scale language technologies, including large-scale language models such as Microsoft’s Turing models or OpenAI’s GPT-3. As a contributor to this initiative, you’ll conduct “deep dives” in partnership with Microsoft product teams who wish to be proactive and strategic about identifying, measuring, or mitigating potential fairness-related harms caused by large-scale language technologies (e.g, stereotyping, demeaning, or erasing groups of people). Successful candidates will have experience working with language technologies and will be passionate about prioritizing diversity, inclusion, and fairness.

We have locations in New York, NY; Redmond, WA; Montreal, QC; Cambridge, MA; and Cambridge, UK.

#Research

Responsibilities

• You’ll be a member of an interdisciplinary team of world experts on the fairness of AI systems.
• Your work will reflect the understanding that fairness a sociotechnical challenge.
• You’ll collaborate with Microsoft product teams on identifying, measuring, or mitigating fairness-related harms caused by large-scale language technologies. You’ll work with them to develop and use methods that are appropriate for their systems, use cases, and deployment contexts.
• You’ll package your work into practices and resources that other teams can use.
• You’ll learn new skills and apply them as needed: You might be asked to learn about a new fairness measurement method from a research paper and implement it. Or you might be asked to prepare a case study and Jupyter notebook that walks practitioners through the process of mitigating fairness-related harms caused by large-scale language technologies.
• You’ll work with stakeholders with a variety of backgrounds: some technical, some non-technical.
• You’ll present your work to internal and external stakeholders, including Microsoft leadership.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, linguistics, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• 1-2 years of experience working with language technologies. This can include product experience, industry research, open-source contributions, or academic research (but not coursework).
• Experience putting responsible AI principles (e.g., fairness, transparency) into practice.
• Familiarity with recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning.
• Coding skills in a general-purpose coding language (e.g., Python, Java, Scala, C#, or C/C++).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in computer science, linguistics, or a related field.
• Good communication (including writing) skills that demonstrate the ability to keep teammates and other stakeholders (e.g., product teams, leadership, customers, users) informed.
• Experience working at the intersection of large-scale language technologies and fairness.
• Familiarity with deep learning frameworks and transformer-based language models.
• Experience working productively on an interdisciplinary team spanning multiple roles.
• Experience working with stakeholders with a variety of technical and non-technical backgrounds.
• Ability to learn independently in new domains, including by reading academic papers.
• Ability to work independently and ramp-up quickly on complex and unfamiliar codebases.
• Strong intellectual curiosity and passion for tackling real-world challenges.
• Track record of prioritizing diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.  We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.