Overview

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.

Responsibilities

- Define north-star metrics and guardrails; build measurement plans, offline scorecards, and online A/B tests; interpret results and drive transparent ship/iterate decisions.
- Build, train, and adapt LLM/SLM solutions for sports scenarios (prompting, supervised fine-tuning, distillation, and domain adaptation), using disciplined evaluation and error analysis to improve quality, latency, and cost.
- Improve relevance and user satisfaction via applied NLP/IR: query intent, disambiguation, ranking, summarization, multilingual support, and robust entity/event understanding for sports.
- Partner with engineering and PM to translate prototypes into shippable systems (data/feature pipelines, training workflows, inference services, monitoring), and to iterate quickly based on experiment outcomes.
- Own end-to-end DS/ML delivery: data strategy (instrumentation, labeling), modeling approach, evaluation, rollout/holdbacks, and long-term iteration plans.
- Mentor and unblock other data scientists and engineers through technical leadership, design reviews, and best practices, while remaining hands-on on critical paths.
- Establish ongoing health signals: KPI dashboards, model/data monitoring, regression gates, and incident playbooks to keep quality high during peak sports moments.
- Ensure Responsible AI and compliance (privacy, security, policy, and regional requirements):



evaluate for safety issues (hallucinations, bias, sensitive content), implement mitigations, and document decisions.

Qualifications Required 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.
- 6+ years of industry experience delivering production ML/DS solutions; 5+ years building deep learning/NLP/IR systems (sports domain experience is a plus).
- Demonstrated ability to lead through influence as a senior IC: independently define strategy, drive execution across teams, and deliver measurable impact.
- Strong foundations in statistics and applied experimentation (metric design, A/B testing, guardrails, causal thinking), and ML evaluation (error analysis and model assessment).
- Experience integrating models into production services: data pipelines, feature stores, CI/CD for ML, monitoring,



and on-call/operational practices.
- Experience with modern generative AI stacks: LLM/SLM fine-tuning and/or adaptation, prompt evaluation, distillation, RAG, and systematic quality/safety evaluation.
- Proven experience building, deploying, and improving large-scale ML systems in customer-facing products, including data quality, performance, reliability, and cost optimization.
- Proficiency in Python (and one of C++/C#/Java preferred) and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow); experience with distributed training/inference is a plus.
- Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in ML/NLP/IR are a plus (not required).

Preferred Qualifications :

- Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 9+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).
- OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 6+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research).
- OR equivalent experience.
- 5+ years experience creating publications (e.g., patents, libraries, peer-reviewed academic papers).
- 2+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
- 5+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings).
- 3+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team.
- 3+ years experience developing and deploying products or systems at multiple points in the product cycle from ideation to shipping.

MicrosoftAI

📌 Principal Applied Scientist (Hyderabad)
🏢 Microsoft
📍 Hyderabad