ML Engineer II

Microsoft Development Center Estonia, with Offices in Tallinn and Tartu, is part of the Experiences & Devices division within Microsoft and well known for its Skype history. Today, our focus is much broader: We are building the Intelligent Conversations & Communications Cloud (IC3) which powers communication services for millions of Microsoft customers around the world across products such as Skype, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Xbox, Windows, Azure and more. Our IC3 platform is one of the largest Azure deployments worldwide and growing rapidly. We own many large-scale applications in Estonia: from real-time communications, engineering systems to commerce, payments, anti-fraud and SMS. 

We develop highly scalable and reliable backend services running on Azure, supporting millions of Microsoft customers every day.  

The AIIM organization at Microsoft builds the end-to-end Azure AI stack/PaaS and is core to Azure’s innovation and differentiation, as well as all of Microsoft’s flagship products for Teams calling and conferencing service including PSTN. We are the team building Azure OpenAI, Azure ML, LLM , CoPilot, Azure AI infrastructure for running the reliable AI workloads on the planet. 

We enable data scientists and developers to quickly and easily build, train, deploy, manage, and consume machine learning models. 

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

As a SW Engineer in our team, you will: 

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including researchers, software engineers, and product managers.
• You will be expected to meet with stakeholders/PM to get the requirements, document the design and review within the team, implement the design, create unit tests on your changes, manage the flighting of the new feature, and implement additional monitoring and metrics as needed for the feature. 
• Design and implement accurate and actionable internal monitoring and tooling to help maintain business Service Level Agreement (SLA) and system health.
• Participate in On Call rotations to support live site and drive engineered solutions to improve customer experiences.
• Design, develop and maintain large scale distributed software services and solutions in a DevOps culture.
• Develop “best-in-class” engineering for our services by ensuring that the services and the components are well-defined and modularized, secure, reliable, diagnosable, actively monitored and reusable.
• Improve test coverage for services, organize and implement integration tests, and resolve problem areas.
• System design through well-defined interfaces across multiple components, code reviews, leveraging data/telemetry to make decisions.  
• Focus on customer/partner needs through a data driven approach.  
• Deploy trained models in production environments.
• Monitor model performance, troubleshoot issues, and iterate on improvements.
• Work with large-scale datasets, preprocess them, and create appropriate data representations.
• Optimize model performance, scalability, and efficiency.
• Conduct experiments to evaluate model performance, robustness, and generalization.
• Explore novel techniques and approaches to enhance model capabilities.
• Stay up to date with the latest advancements in LLM, NLP, deep learning, and AI research.
• Select relevant features and ensure data quality for training and evaluation.
• Communicate technical findings and insights effectively. 

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python, KQL
  • OR equivalent experience.
• Depth in Data Science, Generative AI and Software Engineering.
• Proficiency in Agile development practices and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
• Background in machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing.
• Experience with:
  • distributed systems design and implementation.
  • transformer-based and diffuser-based models (e.g., BERT, GPT, T5, Llama, Stable diffusion).
  • cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS) and distributed computing.

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:

• Experience in a DevOps culture to maintain live services and\or application frameworks.
•  Dedicated analytical skills with systematic and structured approach to software design.
• Experience building LLM and Machine Learning solutions.
• Experience with debugging and resolving complex technical issues, particularly when the areas are not well-understood.
• Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.
• Good understanding of statistics, linear algebra, and probability theory.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and collaboratively 
• Good understanding of statistics, linear algebra, and probability theory.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and collaboratively 
• A growth mindset and a willingness to learn new things and take on challenges.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.