PROSE

Machine Learning Researcher Opportunity – LLMs for Spreadsheets

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 researchers with machine learning and high-impact research 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. 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 on the story behind one of the team’s early innovations: the Flash Fill feature in Excel. 

Responsibilities 

As a researcher, you will have the opportunity to: 

• Design and carry out innovative machine learning research with applications to code and data platforms (e.g., Excel). 
• Work with engineers and PMs to deploy your research to customers. 
• Collaborate with academic partners, mentor interns and longer-term research fellows. 
• Publish in top-tier academic venues and interact with the broader academic community. 

Required Qualifications

• PhD (or close to completion, if early career) in Computer Science or a relevant field. 
• At least 3 publications in top-tier ML or relevant venues (e.g. AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP, NAACL, ACL, and comparable). 
• Ability to develop an original research agenda, demonstrated by leading at least one publication in a top-tier ML or relevant venue. 
• At least 3 years of prior research experience in related areas, including but not limited to, neural program synthesis, natural language processing, and applications of deep learning. 
• At least 2 years of prior experience in training transformer-based models (including collecting and curating training data) as part of research projects in an industrial or academic setting. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with large language models, including automated prompt tuning, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning and continued pre-training. 
• Experience with reinforcement learning and its applications to training LLMs. 
• Have interests in applying machine learning to structured and semi-structured data such as tabular data. 
• Hold previous industrial research internship positions. 
• Experience collaborating across multi-disciplinary or multi-role teams. 
• Strong communication skills. 

Contact: Please apply here Researcher II | Microsoft CareersOpens in a new tab

Human-Computer Interaction Researcher Opportunity

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 researchers with human-computer interaction and high-impact research 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. 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 on the story behind one of the team’s early innovations: the Flash Fill feature in Excel. 

Responsibilities 

As a researcher, you will have the opportunity to: 

• Design and carry out innovative HCI research with applications to code and data platforms (e.g., Excel). 
• Work with engineers to deploy your research to customers. 
• Publish in top-tier academic venues and interact with the broader academic community. 
• Collaborate with academic partners, mentor interns and longer-term research fellows. 

Required Qualifications 

• PhD (or close to completion, if early career) in Computer Science or a relevant field. 

• At least 3 publications in top-tier HCI venues. 

Preferred Qualifications  

• Ability to develop an original research agenda, demonstrated by leading at least one publication in a top-tier HCI or relevant venue (e.g. HCI, UIST). 
• At least 2 years of prior research experience in related areas, including but not limited to, AI-human interaction. 
• Strong communication skills. 
• Experience collaborating across multi-disciplinary or multi-role teams. 

Contact: Please apply here Researcher II Human Computer Interaction (HCI) | Microsoft CareersOpens in a new tab

Senior Researcher Opportunity (in India) – LLMs for Spreadsheet

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 researchers with machine learning, programming language, or software engineering research 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. 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 on the story behind one of the team’s early innovations: the Flash Fill feature in Excel. 

Responsibilities 

As a researcher, you will have the opportunity to: 

• Design and carry out innovative research with applications to code and data platforms (e.g., Excel). 
• Work with engineers and PMs to deploy your research to customers. 
• Collaborate with academic partners, mentor interns and longer-term research fellows. 
• Publish in top-tier academic venues and interact with the broader academic community. 

Required Qualifications 

• PhD (or close to completion, if early career) in Computer Science or a relevant field. 
• At least 2 publications in top-tier machine learning, programming language, software engineering or relevant venues (e.g. AAAI, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP, NAACL, ACL, POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA, ICSE, FSE, and comparable). 
• Ability to develop an original research agenda, demonstrated by leading at least one publication in a top-tier machine learning, programming language, software engineering or relevant venue. 
• At least 3 years of prior research experience in machine learning, programming language, or software engineering. 

Preferred Qualifications  

• 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, including automated prompt tuning, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning and continued pre-training. 
• Experience with reinforcement learning and its applications to training LLMs. 
• Have interests in applying machine learning to structured and semi-structured data such as tabular data. 
• Hold previous industrial research internship positions. 
• Experience collaborating across multi-disciplinary or multi-role teams. 
• Strong communication skills. 

Contact: Please apply here Senior Researcher | Microsoft Careers

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Associate Researcher Opportunity (in India) – LLMs for Spreadsheets

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. Associcate researchers 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. 

Responsibilities 

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 

• 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. 

Preferred Qualifications  

• 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, including automated prompt tuning, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning and continued pre-training. 
• Experience with reinforcement learning and its applications to training LLMs. 
• Have interests in applying machine learning to structured and semi-structured data such as tabular data. 
• Strong communication skills. 

Contact: Please apply here Researcher | Microsoft Careers

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Principal Research Engineer Opportunity (in India)

Do you enjoy thinking outside the box?  Don’t fit well into any one traditional role/job description?  Meet the PROSE team.  We’re a cross-disciplinary, multi-geo, blended research, data-science and engineering team working to empower users with AI, and we’re looking for someone like us who doesn’t fit the mold.  Our ideal candidate would be interested in a mix of management and IC work, research and engineering, teaching and learning and interacting with individuals spread across the globe.  We not only need someone who can work in our dynamic environment but someone who is excited to help us evolve, grow and solve both technical and operational challenges. 

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 individuals with a proven track record of delivering products to apply for a full-time Applied Science 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. Team members design and carry out research underlying state-of-the-art systems and 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. 

Responsibilities 

As an applied scientist, you will have the opportunity to: 

• Mentor research fellows, associate researchers, data scientists and engineers. 
• Help set team direction and strategy both operationally and with regard to research and product agenda. 
• Participate in innovative research with applications to code and data platforms (e.g., Excel). 
• Deploy products based on this research to customers. 
• Publish in top-tier academic venues and interact with the broader academic community. 

Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a relevant field AND 6+ years related experience. 

• OR Master’s degree in Computer Science or a relevant field AND 4+ years related experience. 
• OR PhD in Computer Science or a relevant field and 3+ years related experience. 
• OR equivalent experience. 

• 1+ year(s) people management experience. 

Preferred Qualifications  

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a relevant field AND 9+ years related experience. 
• 5+ years people management experience. 
• 2+ years experience conducting research as part of a research program (in academic or industry settings). 
• 5+ years experience developing and deploying live production systems, as part of a product team. 
• Multiple instances of participating in the full product cycle from ideation to shipping. 
• Experience collaborating across multi-disciplinary or multi-role teams. 
• Experience with Machine Learning and especially generative AI such as LLMs. 

Contact: Please apply here Principal Researcher | Microsoft Careers

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Senior Software Engineer Opportunity (in India)

The PRogram Synthesis using Examples (PROSE) team is a blended research and engineering team where engineers work side-by-side with researchers to do fundamental research while at the same time shipping 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. 

Our team builds an SDK which enables both high-level use of APIs already created for program synthesis scenarios in a variety of areas as well as lower-level creation of program synthesis solutions for new domains. We bring cutting-edge research into programming languages and machine learning together with solid engineering practices to deliver high-impact solutions for teams across Microsoft. Our codebase has a core primarily written in C# targeting both desktop .net and CoreClr on windows, mac and linux, but we incorporate a broad set of technologies including Python, Typescript, SQL and Java. Our SDK is used in all sorts of places from front-end user productivity technologies, to backend server systems, business applications, developer tools and much more.  Come be part of the team that shipped FlashFill in Excel, Intellicode Suggestions in Visual Studio (just to name a few) and is working to create many more such magical experiences.  See https://aka.ms/prose for more about the team. 

Responsibilities 

The engineer will work closely with both researchers and other engineers to help drive our end-to-end engineering efforts. If you are looking for an opportunity to broaden your experience, this is the place for you. We create new algorithms, build and test robust implementations and frameworks across multiple platforms, leverage very large ML/DNN models, work with partners to integrate our technologies into apps across the company and maintain infrastructure to support the team. You will get the opportunity to work on many different things and have tremendous impact. 

Required Qualifications 

• 5+ years of professional experience in software development 

Preferred Qualifications 

• BA/BS or MS Degree in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent additional years of professional experience in lieu of degree 
• Professional experience programming in C#, Typescript or Python 
• Must be able to work closely with other engineers and researchers on the team 
• Willingness to work with multiple products and technologies 

• Experience working with Roslyn analyzers or compilers is a plus 

Contact: Please apply here Senior Software Engineer | Microsoft Careers

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Research Fellowship Opportunity in AI-driven Program Synthesis (in India)

NOTE: We still need to hire 2 research fellows. Please send your application to prose-jobs@microsoft.com

99% of people who own computers do not know how to program, and even experts often struggle to code accurately. Through program synthesis, a new frontier in AI, we can help everyone generate programs that accomplish their tasks faster and more accurately, from users who have never written a line of code to professional developers. Advances in symbolic and neural methods, such as large language models, are accelerating the pace at which we can push the state-of-the-art in this area.

The PROSE team develops state of the art program synthesis systems and ships these innovations through flagship Microsoft products like Excel, Visual Studio, PowerQuery, PowerShell, and SQL Server Management Studio. Our work is characterized by building on fundamental insights in both logical reasoning and machine learning and combining them in unique ways to synthesize programs (or solutions to tasks that can be framed as programs). This approach has been recognized with regular papers at top-tier conferences in the AI, machine learning, programming languages, and software engineering communities; a few of them won best paper and test-of-time awards.

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. To learn more about approach and culture, see this talk: “Art of doing disruptive research”.

The goal of the research fellowship program is to provide fellows with an opportunity to build their research and engineering skills in a unique industrial research environment. Fellows join with our team to explore open research problems (guided by the team’s product partnerships), develop state-of-the-art techniques to address these challenges, publish their results in top conferences, and implement their contributions in features that ship in real products. To support these goals, fellows are paired with experienced researchers as mentors and offered weekly workshop training, with a rotating focus on critical areas such as skill building, engineering mentorship, research mentorship, and communication/story telling.

The research fellowship program is a 1 year appointment, with a possibility to renew in some cases for a second year and in fewer cases provide longer term opportunities.

Qualifications: We are looking for India-based candidates to work on projects at the cutting edge of machine learning and software. Undergraduates or masters students who are finishing up their degrees are welcome to apply. Some desirable qualifications are:

• Proficient programming skills and an interest in learning to write production-quality code
• Excellent communication skills and an interest in working with a multi-disciplinary team
• Background in machine learning with an interest in learning its applications to programs
• Prior exposure to popular neural network development toolkits such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, Jax, or similar or a keen interest in learning to use these
• A keen interest in combining research and engineering

Contact: To apply, send an email to prose-jobs@microsoft.com. Please send a CV and optionally a few paragraphs on your aspirations and why you are interested in this opportunity. Please include “Research Fellowship Application” in the subject. While we would like to receive applications all year round, we are unable to respond to each application. If we find your application promising, we will get in touch with you.

Learn More and Frequently Asked Questions

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