Head of Applied Science

**Head of Applied Science - Clipchamp**:
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

+ 3 more locations

Date posted

**Aug 29, 2025**
- Job number

**1864317**
- Work site

**Up to 100% work from home**
- Travel

**0-25**%**
- Role type

**People Manager**
- Profession

**Research, Applied, & Data Sciences**
- Discipline

**Applied Sciences**
- Employment type

**Full-Time**

**Overview**:

- As Microsoft continues to lead the way in AI innovation, Clipchamp is at the forefront of transforming how people create and consume video content. We are the go-to video platform with a simple mission: to empower anyone to tell stories worth sharing.

We’re seeking a **Head of Applied Science** to lead the future of AI-powered video creation and consumption. In this hands-on leadership role, you’ll set strategic direction, grow and mentor a team of high-performing scientists and turn cutting-edge research into impactful product capabilities. You’ll bridge foundational model innovation with real-world development, automating editing, enabling new storytelling formats and delivering user-friendly, intelligent video tools.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. As employees, we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realise 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

**Qualifications**:
**Required Qualifications**:

- Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 8+ 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 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 5+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
- OR equivalent experience.
- 3+ years of people management experience.
- 4+ years of experience designing, running, and evaluating experiments, leveraging user feedback and telemetry to improve system performance.
- Deep expertise with large language models (LLMs), including techniques such as prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

**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**:

- Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering,
- OR related field AND 12+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
- OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering,
- OR related field AND 8+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
- OR equivalent experience.
- 7+ years of people management experience.
- 3+ years experience presenting at conferences or other events in the outside research/industry community as an invited speaker.
- Experience presenting as an invited speaker at conferences or other industry/research community events.
- 7+ years of research experience in academic or industry environments.
- 5+ years of experience developing and deploying live production systems within a product team.
- 7+ years of experience delivering products or systems across multiple phases of the product lifecycle, from concept through to launch.
- 8+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning or AI solutions in production environments, with a proven track record of taking projects from prototype to large-scale release.
- Solid programming skills in languages such as Python (and/or C++/Java) and proficiency with ML frameworks/tools such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.

**Responsibilities**:

- Lead the design and development of advanced ML/NLP/CV models to power intelligent video editing, generation and personalisation.
- Architect and refine machine learning models (supervised and unsupervised) that optimise the relevance, quality and creativity of video outputs.
- Build and scale relevance and ranking systems tailored to video discovery and editing recommendations.
- Develop synthetic and real-world datasets for training and benchmarking AI models in video domains.
- Design rigorous evaluation methodologies that reflect real creator workflows and measure user-perceived quality.
- Continuously iterate using real user feedback, t