Why a Machine learning job at Microsoft is the best job ever!

Jennifer Marsman can use technology to figure out when her husband is lying. Not long ago, she put her brainwave-sensing headset on him and asked a series of simple questions like are you married? Do you have five kids? Do you have red hair?

She had him answer truthfully at first: Yes, No, No. Then she had him lie. Seeing his brain activity in each instance was the beginning of her efforts to use electroencephalography (EEG) data and what she calls “crazy, beautiful math” to build a lie detector — and all as part of her job as a principal developer evangelist for machine learning at Microsoft.

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She remembers when she pitched “this crazy idea” to the company: ‘Hey, I want to do lie detection with Azure Machine Learning and this headset. Will you please, please buy me this headset?’” she recalls. “They bought me the headset, and Microsoft let me do this on work time. Microsoft was incredibly supportive. I love this company.”

She’s still doing experiments and otherwise working on the project, which is aimed at using machine learning algorithms to figure out how EEG data correlates with whether someone is telling the truth.

“Data science is one of the new, up-and- coming, hot fields right now because every company has data —millions of log files that they’ve collected but don’t know how to make sense out of or take action based on,” Marsman says. “Catching something early and being able to predict a failure before it happens costs so much less than cleaning it up afterwards.”

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WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET THIS JOB?

FYI: Employees across the company are creating new technology, refining existing products, enhancing business operations and developing their own machine learning expertise as applied scientists, data scientists, software engineers and program managers.

“Machine learning is the DNA of Microsoft. It’s everywhere,” says Amanda Papp, a senior machine learning and data science recruiter.

“You can apply machine learning to search, advertising, security, gaming — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Papp says she looks for candidates who have experience with researching or applying machine learning algorithms to solve real-world problems and the “passion for making a difference on a global scale.”

And it doesn’t matter what domain you’re familiar with; skills in anything from bioinformatics to security to social media “can easily transfer to a number of machine learning roles at Microsoft,” she says.

Marsman says there’s “unlimited potential” at Microsoft to delve into the in-demand field, from working as a developer who’s using data science to enrich a current product to being among “the brilliant minds in Microsoft Research who are driving the cutting edge of what can be done with machine learning.”

“There’s so much potential to make people’s lives better with this technology. That’s what really gets me excited at the end of the day…”

(Source: Microsoft)