Microsoft Belgrade opens ML roles for its Office AI team
Microsoft's Belgrade development center is hiring machine learning engineers for the Office AI team, with positions posted on the careers portal in May 2026.
Would you work on a model that helps millions of people build an Excel sheet every day? Microsoft Belgrade has opened concrete machine learning roles for its Office AI team in May 2026.
This is not a statement of intent. These are live positions on the official careers portal, with job descriptions and an application process.
Microsoft’s Belgrade office is not new. The company has been in the Serbian capital since the late 1990s. The difference is that, over the past few years, the site has shifted from a local sales office to a real development hub shipping pieces of Office and Azure used globally.
What an Office AI ML engineer actually does
A machine learning engineer here is not building models from scratch. The Office AI team adapts existing models for specific tasks inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
In plain terms, this is the work behind the Copilot features. The model that suggests your next sentence in Word. The model that scans your table and proposes a chart. The model that turns five paragraphs of text into a ten-slide deck.
The job, then, is working with large datasets, training models on a concrete problem, and measuring performance before a feature ships to millions of users.
What the Belgrade job market looks like
Microsoft is not alone in Belgrade. Nordeus, Endava, NCR, Schneider Electric and IBM all have meaningful footprints. Nordeus, a domestic gaming firm founded in 2011, now has over 200 employees and focuses on mobile football titles.
Competition for AI talent is fierce. ML engineer salaries in 2026 run from around 250,000 dinars net for a junior role to over 800,000 dinars for a senior architect with several years of experience. Microsoft sits in the upper part of that range, though it is not the absolute top of the market.
What this means for students and junior engineers
Microsoft Belgrade runs intake programs with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Faculty of Mathematics. The summer internship lasts ten weeks with a stipend that covers living costs.
The real value is not the stipend. It is the path into a junior engineering role after graduation.
The bar to enter is high:
- Solid Python or C++
- Statistics and machine learning fundamentals
- At least one project or research paper in AI
Without this baseline, even an internship is not a realistic option.
What senior candidates need to bring
The technical kit for a senior position is standard for 2026:
- Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow
- Distributed systems work (multiple servers running in concert)
- SQL and at least one cloud platform (Azure, AWS or GCP)
Soft skills matter just as much. The Belgrade team works alongside colleagues in the US and across Europe. English is mandatory; Serbian is a bonus only for internal chats. Meetings with US teams often mean late afternoon hours because of the time difference.
What other domestic tech centers are doing
Nordeus also runs machine learning, but with different goals: game personalization, multiplayer balancing, cheat prevention.
Endava and other consulting firms run ML projects for clients around the world. Positions vary from project to project.
The local AI startup scene is smaller, but growing. A handful of Belgrade teams work on AI translation, computer vision for agriculture, and banking process automation.
What this means for Serbia’s tech scene
Microsoft continuing to hire in Belgrade is a signal. Large companies are not abandoning the local talent market, even as Bulgaria, Romania and Poland grow in parallel.
Three things keep Belgrade competitive: competitive pay, an ideal timezone for working with Europe and the US, and the quality of graduates from technical faculties.
The real risk is brain drain. Many engineers who take a temporary role in the US never come back. Microsoft Belgrade counters this with flexible remote work and rotations into international teams without physically relocating.
Is the local tech scene strong enough to keep ML talent?
Partly, yes. Microsoft, Nordeus and a handful of domestic AI startups offer jobs that match Berlin or Vienna in both content and pay.
The gap is in cost of living, public services and tax policy. That keeps pushing a share of the best engineers abroad.
Would you consider working for Microsoft Belgrade or a similar firm, and what would weigh heaviest in your decision?
