At the Web Data team we're looking for a passionate Applied Scientist to help us on our mission of building novel deep learning techniques to understand all the data on the web; the largest store of information in human history. With this understanding we power end-user experiences across a variety of areas, including:

• Relevance of search results on Bing.com
• Question answering
• Recommender systems

As a team, we play a central role in document understanding and connecting users to their information needs across the entire web. Work in our team is unique in that you'll be able to work with industry-leading scales of data (raw and training data) and computing resources, which pushes the frontiers of deep learning technologies in our focus areas. Moreover, it provides interesting challenges that haven't been encountered before, thereby combining long-term research and real-world impacts.

Examples of our team's work include:
• Revolutionize the field of information retrieval through bridging the accuracy gap between purely deep learning based retrieval (dense retrieval) and the traditional sparse, bag-of-word based, classic IR systems, using purely learned text representations. [paper, github]
• New auto-encoder based pre-trained language models for better document representation power for dense retrieval in search, QA, and recommendation. [paper, github]
• Develop the best technology to bring deep learning solutions to unprecedented scale, for example we built the world's fastest tokenizer. [github]
• Establish new benchmarks for natural language understanding tasks such as key phrase extraction. [paper, github]

We are looking for a passionate Applied Scientist with demonstrable skills in deep learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities:
• Conduct research and development of deep learning models for language understanding, multi-modal representation learning, and their usage in downstream tasks, e.g., search, QA and recommendation, etc.
• Push the state-of-the-art in those areas through multiple aspects, for example:
        Defining the problem space
        Gathering training data at scale
        Exploring model design and architecture
        Exploring learning objectives and tasks
• Ideal outcome of the work is the development of new technologies that potentially lead to
        Solutions that impact real production scenarios in Microsoft
        Impactful research papers

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:
• Graduate degree in CS, EE or a related STEM field
• Must have at least 5 years of experience in conducting research, writing peer-reviewed publications and/or software development
• Experience in developing deep learning models using Pytorch or Tensorflow

Preferred Qualifications:
• Passionate and self-motivated
• Good communication skills, both verbal and written
• Focus on technique progresses with real world impact during design and development
• Ability and motivation to self-teach while entering new domains and managing through ambiguity
• Actively conducting research in at least one of the following areas: artificial intelligence, data science, information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing

As an applied scientist on our team, you will be collaborating on projects throughout their entire lifecycle from idea creation through implementation, experimentation, publication, and finally, potential influences to real world scenarios. We are looking for a motivated applied scientist to help contribute to the design and implementation of the next generation of text representation and understanding techniques in Microsoft.

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.