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Principal Applied Science Manager - Excel Team

Microsoft· Applied Sciences
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Redmond, WA$142.8k - $274.8kFull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Lead and develop a team of applied scientists to architect, design, and deliver AI-powered experiences in Microsoft Excel, applying state-of-the-art techniques (LLMs, deep learning, retrieval, agent orchestration) across end-to-end product lifecycle from prototyping to production, with a hands-on technical leadership focus.

Responsibilities

  • Lead, grow, mentor, and inspire an inclusive, high-performing team of applied scientists. Support individual career development and guide team members through complex technical and product problem spaces.
  • Maintain a hands-on, builder-oriented approach, contributing directly to technical design, prototyping, experimentation, implementation, and production readiness as needed.
  • Own the end-to-end technical and scientific direction for your team’s AI capabilities, from identifying customer scenarios and defining success criteria through experimentation, evaluation, deployment, and continuous improvement.
  • Translate product scenarios and customer needs into well-defined machine learning, LLM, retrieval, program synthesis, and agentic-system problems; identify key technical challenges and design experiments to address them.
  • Drive projects from concept through implementation, experimentation, production integration, and successful release to customers.
  • Establish and maintain a high scientific and engineering bar for model quality, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and customer value.
  • Design and drive rigorous evaluation frameworks for intelligent applications, using offline metrics, human evaluation, telemetry, real-world feedback, and failure analysis to identify opportunities for improvement.
  • Work directly with customers and partners to understand real-world usage patterns, pain points, and failure modes, translating those insights into product, scientific, and engineering priorities.
  • Lead the preparation, curation, and quality assessment of datasets used for modeling, evaluation, and experimentation, including identifying data quality constraints and opportunities.
  • Stay current on relevant research, industry trends, and emerging techniques, applying them pragmatically to customer-facing Excel experiences.
  • Collaborate across the Office Product Group and broader Microsoft AI, research, and platform communities to share evaluation practices, adopt and contribute to common infrastructure, and avoid duplicated investment.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research) OR equivalent experience.
  • 1+ year(s) of people management experience.

Skills

Required:People managementMachine learning / AI product developmentLarge language models (LLMs)

Benefits

  • This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
  • Applied Sciences M5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.
  • Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.
Last updated Oct 9, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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