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 .

Thes e products i nclud e the world’s most popular spreadsheet software Excel, the industry-leading IDE s Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, the power platform suite of products including Power B I, PowerApps, PowerAutomate , and other software tool s 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 entry-level researchers with an interest in program synthesis, developer/end-user tools, and high-impact research to apply for a full-time position in 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 at a global scale. Researchers 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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=421gU482xFE) on the story behind one of the team’s early innovations: the Flash Fill feature in Excel.

Responsibilities

As an entry-level researcher, you will have the opportunity to:

• Contribute to innovative research, under the guidance of senior researchers and engineers, that integrates various artificial intelligence technologies and delivers features for customer-facing Microsoft products

• Design, implement, and experiment across a range of domains, including data wrangling, developer tools, end-user programming, and programming education

• Publish in top-tier academic venues and interact with the broader academic community, for example giving talks about PROSE research

• Collaborate with researchers, engineers, and jointly mentor research fellows

Qualifications

Required Q ualifications

• Bachelors, Masters, or comparable experience,in Computer Science or a relevant field

• Demonstrated experience with research tasks by contributing to at least one academic paper draft, submission, or publication. Relevant tasks include collecting and analyzing data, formulating hypotheses, designing experiments, implementing systems to validate hypotheses, reporting results, academic writing for conference submissions, and presenting work to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Experience implementing research prototypes in languages (including but not limited to) Python, C#, and Typescript

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to carry out a research project, demonstrated by a submission (or ideally publication) at a top-tier PL/SE/HCI/ML/DB venue (e.g. PLDI, OOPSLA, UIST, CHI, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, SIGMOD, VLDB, POPL, FSE, ICSE, ASE, EMNLP, NAACL, ACL, and comparable)

• At least 2 years of prior experience in Computer Science, or related fields

• Experience in training transformer-based models (including collecting and curating training data) as part of research projects in an industrial or academic setting.

• Experience working with large language models.

• Have interests in applying machine learning to structured and semi-structured data such as tabular data.

• Strong communication skills

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. Consistent with applicable law, 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 and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations (https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/accessibility.html) .