Sr. Research Software Development Engineer

The goal of Bing Search is to deliver the most relevant knowledge to our customers by building the best decision engine. Data is critical to achieving this goal, and data mining is the key to unlocking the value of the data and turning raw data into actions.

The Bing Data Mining Team is hiring extremely talented, highly motivated and productive individuals. You will be part of a very strong and fun team building data infrastructure, conducting research and experiments, and developing data mining, machine learning, and Business Intelligence techniques for solving some of the most challenging problems in the world and generating real impact. Here, you have the right environment and strong support to drive your favorite features to solution. You are empowered to influence millions of end users while impacting the Microsoft online business. You will have the opportunity to work together with world class researchers and developers in one of the hottest growth fields today.

We process hundreds of terabytes of data every day describing systems that are constantly changing, while ensuring the data quality is high quality and suitable for analysis. Our data sets include Bing user interaction logs, web documents, the web index, user feedback, and system performance data. This data contains valuable information for building the #1 system to serve users' information needs and help them to make decisions. The data is also critical for driving good business decisions.

We are enabling and developing techniques to understand user intent; discover patterns to improve search relevance and result ranking; detect and filter bot traffic, spam, and noise; measure relevance and user satisfaction quickly and effectively; identify new information needs from end users; identify weak points of the search system; discover system performance problems; measure/understand the health of the online business; and satisfy a list of needs that grows every day. We also work on techniques to manage and process petabytes of data efficiently and effectively. You will have opportunities to use and contribute to a high performance super-parallel/distributed massive storage computer system (cloud computation).

Job Responsibilities include:

• Build high quality data infrastructure and data mining/analysis solutions to provide data and information needs of search development and business. This covers web usage logs and web contents, web index, web graphs, etc.
• Analyze (including processing) a huge amount of data by using data mining, statistics, and database techniques. The goal is to measure/understand user experience, system performance, and business health, generate actionable insights for improving search systems, and increasing user satisfaction.
• Research and exploration in the areas of data mining, machine learning, text mining, search system live measurement and monitoring, bot/spam traffic identification and filtering, etc.
• Work with other teams in Bing Search and other online business units on identifying problems in different areas where data mining/machine learning/statistics can help. Explore and develop solutions to these problems. Act as an expert in the area of data mining/machine learning/statistics to serve the fast growing needs of Bing Search.
• Develop techniques/algorithms/measurement for the research and analysis work mentioned above.
• Design and carry out experiments to evaluate research/development results and their real impact on Bing Search production systems.
• Provide technical leadership to other developers.

• Extensive software design and development skills/experience with C#/C/C++/SQL (minimum 5 years, preferred: 7 years).
• Experience with test driven software design/development is a plus.
• Solid experience in very large real world data processing/analysis especially with web data.
• Extensive knowledge and experience in at least two of the following areas: data mining, web mining, machine learning, statistics, business intelligence/customer intelligence, user modeling, information retrieval, databases, data warehousing, OLAP, data processing (ETL), e-metrics/measurement, parallel and distributed computation (two or more areas are preferred).
• Strong theory/algorithm background and very good understanding on how to apply advanced knowledge to solve real problems.
• Experience/knowledge with various data analysis tools, data mining tools, and statistical packages.
• Superior communications skills, both verbal and written.
• Ability to work independently and in a team to research innovative solutions to challenging business/technical problems.
• Attention to detail and data accuracy.
• Bachelor degree in computer science or related field. Ph.D. in the area of data mining/machine learning/statistics/databases or related areas is also required.

_Contact_:
In order to be considered for this position, you must apply online via our career site.

If you have questions about this position, please contact me at cbugni@microsoft.com. Resumes received via email cannot be considered until you formally apply online.