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Soon The Microsoft MSN Search Team will be in Russia , interviewing interested and qualified candidates for software development positions here in the USA at our corporate headquarters working on our major products. 

What is a qualified candidate?
*          Someone who has (or will be completing this year) a bachelor’s (four year or more) degree in Computer Science or a related field

*          Someone that has very strong abilities to write code in C/C++
*          Someone that is very driven and passionate about technology, desiring to make software products that will go all over the world

*          Someone with fluent English speaking skills
 
WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT AT MICROSOFT
The reason so many people from various disciplines come to Microsoft is because we provide the most exciting challenges in the industry. Since our inception in 1975, Microsoft’s mission has been to create software for the personal computer that empowers and enriches people in the workplace, at school and at home. Microsoft’s early vision of a computer on every desk and in every home is coupled today with a strong commitment to Internet -related technologies that expand the power and reach of the PC and its users. You can help shape the industry in nearly countless ways, all while gaining invaluable experience. Our casual environment lends itself to freer thinking and therefore, creative problem-solving. However, the coolest part of all is the diversity of jobs. You’re guaranteed not to be bored.

We invite you to join us as we move toward the .NET age, the next generation of our products. You could create a world of change in one of these pivotal, Redmond , Washington USA area positions in the Microsoft product groups.  Here is a list of the core positions we will be looking to fill.

Software Design Engineer in Development
Design and implement various new components of the next release of the Windows operating system, Office, Visual Studio, .NET, MSN, SQL Server or other key Microsoft Products. Specific areas of expertise include COM/DCOM, ActiveX, Java, Graphics, Networking, and  Base/Kernel. The candidate should have BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Informatics, Physics or Mathematics.  Strong C/C++ skills, sound knowledge of operating system fundamentals and server development, and preferably more than 3 years of programming experience.  

Software Design Engineer in Test
Design and develop test plans/test suites to test various components of one of our primary products- Windows , Office, Visual Studio, .NET, etc.  Work closely with the developers and other test team members to isolate and resolve problems.  The candidate should have BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Informatics, Physics or Mathematics.  Strong C/C++ skills, sound knowledge of operating system fundamentals and server development and preferably more than 3 years of programming experience.

There are multiple positions open, so please share the information with someone as good as you are.
 
All positions are at our corporate headquarters in Redmond , Washington , USA .  We do require functional level English language skills, written and spoken.

If you are interested, please email your CV in English to russiacv@microsoft.com
 
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer.

 

Data Mining

Data Mining is a hot, new area, and we want a talented, highly motivated individual to join our growing Data Mining group. With all the data from the World Wide Web, we have endless potential to uncover patterns to help us improve our Search Engine, delight our customers, and confound our competition. This is an opportunity to use all kinds of leading-edge technologies, including machine-learning (Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, Hidden Markov Models, etc.), Natural Language software, Parallel processing, and very large databases. You must be highly customer focused, and have several of the following qualifications: proven experience with C++; proven experience with object-oriented design; very solid coding/debugging skills; solid algorithmic skills; knowledge of SVMs, Neural Networks, HMMs, Decision Trees, etc. with in-depth knowledge of and practical experience with at least one or two of these; demonstrated success at dealing with ambiguous problems; and the ability to make solid progress when the solution is not well defined. Actual experience doing data mining is desirable, but not required. Basic knowledge of SQL is required. Masters CS or equivalent.

 

Spam Busting

Spam is one of the top killers of relevance for any search engine.  Try the queries: valentine, big island or cialis to see this firsthand.  Low quality, low relevance sites use several techniques to spam their way into search results.  Spam adversely affects all areas of search -- crawl, data extraction, link-analysis, results ranking. We need someone to kill spam dead.  As in the data mining area, this is an opportunity to use all kinds of leading-edge technologies, including machine-learning (SVMs, etc.), parallel processing, graph theory to tame this problem. The ideal candidate will combine strong software engineering skills with a solid background in one or more of these disciplines. Enthusiasm for reviewing the latest research, inventing new techniques, and doing rigorous experimental validation is required.

 

Results Ranking

The Ranking team develops the components that predict in a fraction of a second which of our 5 billion web documents will best answer a user's query. It is one of the highest impact and most technically challenging projects you will find anywhere in our industry. In collaboration with Microsoft Research, we explore cutting edge techniques from statistics, information retrieval, machine learning, and computational linguistics to attack this problem. The ideal candidate will combine strong software engineering skills with a solid background in one or more of these disciplines. Enthusiasm for reviewing the latest research, inventing new techniques, and doing rigorous experimental validation is required. Foreign language skills are also a plus.

  

Question Answering

Do you want a search engine that can answer your questions instead of returning a list of documents? This is one of our most technically ambitious projects, and we need a few exceptional SDEs who can make it a success. In collaboration with Microsoft Research, we will take a promising prototype and add innovations that dramatically improve its accuracy, coverage, and language portability. In addition to strong software engineering skills, the ideal candidate will have strengths in statistics, machine learning, and/or computational linguistics. Foreign language skills are also a plus.

 

Web Structure Analysis

The web has a complex structure that gives us valuable information about the popularity and authoritativeness of documents in our search index. Success in web search depends on harvesting as much information as we can from this massive source of data. This area is filled with fascinating technical challenges from distributed graph algorithms to pattern recognition, and because people are constantly trying new ways to manipulate search engine rankings, there are always new challenges. Candidates for this position should have a strong software engineering and computer science background that includes graph theory, distributed computing, performance optimization, probability and statistics, and machine learning.

  

Enabling Engineering Excellence

We are a growing team, with a growing v1 codebase.  We are looking for someone to help us build tools to ensure that this is the best engineering team at Microsoft. You will be responsible for managing all aspects of our engineering excellence work -- laying out our future source management strategy, our build infrastructure, our branching methodology, the whole works.... You will take pride in raising development efficiency across the team, and in being the enabler of great search technology. You must have prior experience working in world-class build environment. You are a perl and sd gearhead. You take pride in your scripts, and in your ability to tame complex dependency problems.

  

Searchable Email

We need an engineer for a new project within the search group. The plan is to get something basic and useful out to the web as soon as we can, and then build on that through a series of quick releases. The team will start out small, just a few people, and with the right people we can keep it small. At scale, the product will run on hundreds of dedicated servers with new servers constantly being added. This kind of "go fast" project requires a good balance of "technology" thinking and "engineering" thinking. The "technology" thinking will be aimed at designing a low cost solution that can handle tens of thousands of requests/updates per second, 24/7, with multiple server failures. The "engineering" thinking will be aimed at designing simple components that are easy to test and can be updated independently so that we can achieve very short release cycles. Implementation will be not-too-fancy C++ running on 64 and 32 bit Windows Server platform. We'll be working from the code base developed for the new in-house MSN Search engine. Part of the project will involve enhancing the core technology, and part will be all new components specific to this project. We will strive for a balance between rapid progress on this project vs. building components that will become the platform for other new projects in the group.  The project is connected to other efforts within MSN, so all project members will also be working with folks outside the project team. The project is very visible in its own right, but is not a "cowboy" project. We're all here to make MSN better. What we're looking for in a candidate: 3+ years server side experience, good C++, worked with multi-tier multi-server systems preferably web related, wrote software that handles high request rates, comfortable working directly with the OS, experience with complex performance tuning.

  

Grepping the web

The index server team is chartered with doing the 'search' in the web search, and doing it faster than a grep on a local file, and doing it for thousands of queries a second, over billions of documents over thousands of servers. Help us create, refine, innovate, and deploy software that defines the ability to provide user answers fast and reliably. We are responsible for the infrastructure that makes it possible to reliably and efficiently manage and process hundreds of terabytes of information.  Along with query serving, this team also provides the platform to support relevance and data mining. You have at least a BS in CS or equivalent with several years of software development experience, a solid background in software development on multithreaded, high scale server systems. You should be comfortable working on a first generation, ambitious project with rapid development iterations and high reliability and performance standards.

  

Running the super computer

The autopilot team builds an infrastructure for MSN Search and other distributed applications. The main challenge is turning unreliable hardware and software into a reliable cluster with 99.9% uptime, only 9 to 5 operations support, and less than 1 operations person for maintaining 1000+ machines. Here are some of the problems you would help to solve: early detection of hardware and software failures; performance monitoring and analysis for the large volumes of computers; distributed applications scheduling and load balancing; messaging and data transfer protocols. Bottom line - we want to build a system that would let 10,000 commodity PCs work as a supercomputer. You have at least a BSCS or equivalent (MS/PhD preferred); 3 years of software development experience using C, C++ or C#; deep understanding

of object oriented design and practical experience at dealing with ambiguous problems.

  

Hand crafted results

When all else fails, and the ranking algorithms do not pass the confidence threshold, we fall back to delivering handcrafted results. Working on a team of approximately 132 other handcrafters in 26 worldwide markets, you will receive a user query, use all the available search engines to quickly scour the web for results, pick the top 10 results for this query, and send it on to the user.  Successful handcrafters can typically find top 10 results for a real-time user's query in less than 3.8 seconds.  This is an opportunity to truly connect with customers, because the queries that get routed to you are precisely the ones that the engine cannot answer well.  We will have adequate staffing to allow generous coffee and bathroom breaks. If you are an expert at using at least 3 different search engines, well versed with American English/colloquial usage, and can type at > 149 words/minute as measured by the Simia-Lico method - come join us and delight users real-time!

 

Please send your CV to russiacv@microsoft.com.

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