Microsoft

Senior Language Engineer

Microsoft • $119K — $234K *
Mountain View, CA 94040In-Person
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Today
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Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's or Master's Degree in relevant field with specified years of experience
  • Preferred Master's or Doctorate with additional experience
  • 3+ years in a fast-paced environment managing multiple priorities
  • Hands-on experience with prompt design and model evaluation
  • Experience in launching consumer-facing products and iterating based on user feedback
  • Familiarity with building LLM applications and efficiency improvements
  • Technical proficiency in software development, data science, and machine learning.

Responsibilities

  • Craft context and prompts for training and evaluating language models
  • Create evaluation frameworks for technical and emotional performance
  • Research and implement novel prompting techniques
  • Utilize language datasets to identify issues and improve models
  • Own project statuses and proactively identify solutions to ensure delivery.

Benefits

  • Work-from-office expectation for U.S. employees
  • Collaborative work environment with diverse teams
  • Opportunity to engage in cutting-edge AI projects
  • Focus on emotional and intellectual language use cases
  • Potential for ongoing education and professional development.
Full Job Description
Overview

We're on the lookout for a detail-oriented Senior Language Engineer to help build the next wave of capabilities of our personal AI, Copilot. Language is an increasingly important modality for how we interact with computers. As a Language Engineer on the Copilot team, you will be responsible for how Copilot wields language. You will collaboratively work with data scientists, AI researchers, engineers, designers, and product managers to discover issues, define policy, evaluate language, collect data and ultimately improve the Large Language Models that power Copilot. We're looking for someone with an abundance of positive energy, empathy, and kindness, in addition to being highly effective. The right candidate takes the initiative and enjoys building world-class consumer experiences and products in a fast-paced environment.

Starting January 26, 2026, Microsoft AI Experiences employees who live within a 50- mile commute of a designated Microsoft office in the U.S. or 25-mile commute of a non-U.S., country-specific location are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Responsibilities
  • Craft and refine the context and prompts used to steer, train and evaluate the language models that power Microsoft Copilot for emotional and intellectual use cases.
  • Create evaluations and establish evaluation frameworks to measure both technical/practical performance and non-deterministic performance like EQ
  • Research & implement novel prompting techniques
  • Spin the data flywheel to extract insights from extensive language datasets to uncover issues and opportunities to improve model response quality.
  • Accountable to own the status of key projects, proactively identifying risks and proposing solutions to ensure timely delivery.


Qualifications

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


Preferred Qualifications:
  • Master'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 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.
  • 3+ years experience working in a fast-paced environment, managing multiple priorities, and adapting to changing requirements and deadlines.
  • Hands-on experience with prompt design, context window management, and model evaluation.
  • 2+ years of experience shipping consumer-facing products. You've brought products to market, collected user feedback, defined success metrics and iteratively improved products.
  • 1+ years of experience in building LLM applications with familiarity in agent and orchestration frameworks, tool use, LLM evaluations and driving efficiency improvements.
  • Technical depth in software development, data science and machine learning. While you are not expected to write code on the critical path, you're able to navigate and contribute to code repositories to implement context engineering improvements and write LLM scorers and classifiers to evaluate model response quality.


Applied Sciences 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 $160,200 - $261,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

About Microsoft

Microsoft is an American multinational corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services. Microsoft’s devices and consumer (D&C) licensing segment licenses the Windows operating system and related software, Microsoft Office for consumers, and the Windows Phone operating system. The company’s computing and gaming hardware segment provides Xbox gaming and entertainment consoles and accessories, second-party and third-party video games, and Xbox Live subscriptions; surface devices and accessories; and Microsoft PC accessories. Its phone hardware segment offers Lumia smartphones and other non-Lumia phones. Its D&C segment provides Windows Store, Xbox Live transactions, and Windows phone store; search advertising; display advertising; Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal; first-party video games; and other consumer products and services as well as operating retail stores. Microsoft’s commercial licensing segments license server products, including Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (CALs); Windows Embedded; Windows operating system; Microsoft Office for business, including Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and related CALs; Microsoft Dynamics business solutions; and Skype. Its commercial segment offers enterprise services, including premier support services and Microsoft consulting services; commercial cloud comprising Office 365 Commercial, other Microsoft Office online offerings, Dynamics CRM Online, and Microsoft Azure; and other commercial products and online services. The company markets and distributes its products through original equipment manufacturers, distributors, and resellers, as well as online.

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Learn more about Microsoft
Size
181,000 employees
Market Cap
$1,762.4 billion
Industry
Enterprise Technology
Net Income
$51.3 billion
Founded
1975
5 Year Trend
+15.5%
Revenue
$153.2 billion
NASDAQ
MSFT
* Ladders Estimates

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