Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Overview

Viva Engage connects people through communities, bringing leaders and employees together to share knowledge, clarify priorities, and build relationships. Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) is the premier tool to create multi-directional dialogue between tens of millions of employees worldwide every month.

Engage team members are at the forefront of driving artificial intelligence (AI) applications and Copilot adoption to make communication and information sharing easy and authentic. Our work supports top challenges for our customers, including digital safety, trusted security standards, and deep analytics to help our customers maximize reach, reduce inefficiencies, and create a thriving organizational culture. We would love to have you join the team driving innovation, connection, and community for our valued global customers.

As a Senior Machine Learning (ML) Engineer on the Viva Engage Search team, your experience in Search, Ranking, and Retrieval systems will help shape the future of intelligent search experiences in the Copilot and Agentic AI space. You will play a key role in designing, developing, and deploying cutting-edge machine learning models that power search experiences that connect individuals with each other and knowledge across organizations. Our focus lies in discovery, recommendations, and relevance across Viva Engage, leveraging data from our platform and across Office 365.

This role presents an opportunity to create a vision around the Viva Engage machine learning platform and help us make it a reality. Our tight-knit, high-performing team, coupled with the unique challenges posed by social enterprise analytics, will offer plenty of opportunities for impact.

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

• Own the full ML lifecycle - Design, build, deploy, and monitor end-to-end pipelines that power Copilot and Agentic Search experiences.
• Build production-ready AI agents that automate workflows and surface smart, context-aware recommendations to boost user productivity.
• Work with massive, complex datasets by applying advanced statistical and machine-learning methods to solve ambiguous, high-impact problems.
• Apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to deliver deep semantic understanding and natural-language interactions that connect employees to knowledge across Microsoft 365.
• Leverage generative-AI techniques for data augmentation, relevance tuning, and highly personalized discovery experiences.
• Validate product intuition with experimentation - translate insights into roadmap influence and data-driven decisions that move key metrics.
• Communicate with clarity - distill intricate technical work for diverse audiences across engineering, product, and executive leadership.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of experience working on Machine Learning models specifically with Natural language-based models.

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Experience on working with Elastic Search/Azure AI Search.
• 2+ years of experience building personalized search solutions across a product/platform.
• Practical experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and leveraging tools like PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• System development skills, with a long-range system view that leverages development ranging from rapid research prototypes to carefully architected complex systems.

Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 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 $158,400 - $258,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
;br>
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.