Research Sciences II

The PROSE team is advancing the state of the art in program synthesis and shipping these innovations through flagship Microsoft products that impact millions of users worldwide. These products include the world’s most popular spreadsheet software Excel, the industry-leading IDEs Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, the power platform suite of products including Power BI, PowerApps, PowerAutomate, and other software tools including Azure Data Studio, Azure Data Monitor, Azure Data Factory, PowerShell, and SQL Server Management Studio. The application domains range from developer productivity, business user low-code/no-code scenarios to even programming education. To power these features PROSE has developed a powerful and flexible framework for program synthesis that leverages techniques from both logical reasoning and machine learning (including LLMs) and combines them in unique ways to synthesize programs automatically. This approach has been recognized with frequent papers at top-tier conferences and awards, including best paper and test-of-time awards.

We invite early-career researchers having experience with machine learning or related areas to apply for a full-time position on the PROSE team at Microsoft. The recent success of large language models (LLMs) creates an opportunity to take a qualitative step forward, to extend dramatically the reach of what users can do with Copilots. Our team provides a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and real-world impact, solving customer problems on a global scale. Associate Researchers II collaborate with other researchers to design and carry out the research underlying state-of-the-art systems, and work together with world-class engineers to implement these systems in production. To learn more about our approach and culture see this award talk on the story behind one of the team’s early innovations: the Flash Fill feature in Excel.

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.

As an Associate Researcher, you will have the opportunity to:

• Design and carry out research jointly with other researchers, engineers, and PMs.
• Work with engineers and PMs to deploy your research to customers.
• Collaborate with other researchers and longer-term research fellows.
• Publish in top-tier academic venues.

Required Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in relevant field AND 1+ year(s) related research experience.
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in relevant field AND 2+ years related research experience.
  • OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a relevant field AND 2+ years related experience.
  • OR Master’s degree in Computer Science or a relevant field AND 1+ years related experience.
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 1+ year of research experience in related areas, including, but not limited to, programming language, software engineering, and deep learning.
• At least 1 paper in top-tier conferences.
• Experience in training transformer-based models (including collecting and curating training data) as part of research projects in an industrial or academic setting.
• Have experience and demonstrated interest working in program synthesis, multimodal understanding, natural language to formula generation, skill learning and improvement, trajectory analysis, grading and evaluation, or auto research and evolutionary agents.
• Solid communication skills.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.