Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more and we believe that artificial intelligence will play a critical role in accomplishing that mission. The Core Search and AI team is the leading applied machine learning team at Microsoft responsible for delivering the highest-quality experience to over 500M+ monthly active users around the world in Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. Beyond Bing other search engines such as Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and new startups like Neeva depend on us as well.

We have seen little innovation in search in the last decade and we are looking for people who want to build the next generation of search using advanced AI technologies such as deep learning. Our work spans a very large scope of scenarios including delivering high quality search results from a massive document corpus, extractive and abstractive summarization to generate document snippets, personalization, machine reading comprehension, and document recommendations.

As a team, we leverage the diverse backgrounds and experiences of passionate engineers, scientists, and program managers to help us realize our goal of making the world smarter and more productive. We believe great products are built by inclusive teams of customer-obsessed individuals who trust each other and work closely together.  We collaborate regularly across the company both to find the technology breakthroughs from groups like Microsoft Research to infusing AI into the rest of Microsoft products like Office and Azure.

Some examples of our work include:

Building the world’s most comprehensive spelling correction system through zero shot learning (covered by NextWeb, Venture Beat, and ZDNet)

Using transformer networks for search (covered in Search Engine Land and in State of AI 2020 report)

Deep learning based question answering and captions (covered in VentureBeat, Search Engine Land)

Codeveloping our large scale training library called DeepSpeed (covered in SiliconAngle, The Batch)

Building and open sourcing blazing fast transformer network inferencing (covered in ZDNet and Forbes) including developing our own accelerated chips for inferencing

Open sourcing our vector search algorithm (covered by Ars Technica and TechCrunch)

If you are passionate about working on the latest and hottest areas that will help you develop skills in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, data science and high scale systems, this is the team you’re looking for! 

Responsibilities

The Core Search and AI team is looking for an experienced Principal Product/Program Manager to understand unmet customer needs and cross reference them with the latest AI trends to build the next generation of search.

Understanding current user needs and gaps by doing opportunity analysis in the problem domain.

Bringing empathy to design unique solutions to customer scenarios.

Defining goals and metrics to measure success.

Developing a strategy and differentiated value proposition for the area.

Formulating release criteria for an MVP and driving a team of engineers and scientists to build, measure, learn and iterate towards a successful solution.

Leveraging your superb interpersonal skills to collaborate and execute with a diverse team.

Providing requirements to backend platform and frontend UX teams to scale the solution.

Guiding Microsoft Research towards solving the future long-term AI problems we will face.

Continuously reading the latest AI and deep learning papers from the hottest conferences (NIPS, ICLR, ICML ACL, EMNLP) and using ideas from them to inspire and direct the team.

Working with marketing and PR teams to evangelize our work.

Prototyping and playing with deep learning and AI toolkits like TensorFlow, PyTorch.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

Bachelors, Masters or advanced degree in computer science, statistics or related field

5+ years of program/product management experience leading the building of software products

Preferred Qualifications:

MS or PhD computer science or related field.

Experience with machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch

Experience building large scale cloud-based solutions.

Customer focused, strategic, drives for results, is self-motivated, and has a propensity for action.

Fantastic problem solver: ability to solve problems that the world has not solved before.

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.