Principal Designer, AI Experience

Overview

The AI Transformation team within Microsoft Frontier Company is reimagining how the company operates in the age of AI. We work across the business to transform critical end-to-end workflows, bringing people, AI agents, and systems together to create fundamentally new ways of working.

Our team is multidisciplinary, including design, applied AI, engineering, program leadership, and business transformation to move rapidly from opportunity to working solution. We operate with a builder mindset: hands-on, highly collaborative, comfortable with ambiguity, and biased toward action. Our goal is not simply to add AI to existing processes, but to build AI-native operating models and reusable solutions that improve how Microsoft Frontier Company works and accelerate transformation at scale.

We are looking for an AI Experience Designer with deep expertise in human-centred product design, and design research to help improve how MFC operates. The people running MFC handle work that is complicated and rarely tidy. This role exists to put better evidence in their hands and take the mechanical weight off them, so that more of their day goes into the work only they can do. Agents are our medium, alongside the wider AI capability we will be building. What is undecided is what a good agent experience looks like in the hands of the people who depend on it.

This is a product design role first. You will study the work as it is done, prototype, test with the people doing it, and ship. What differs is the material. You are not designing software that waits to be told what to do. You are designing for systems that act on someones behalf, while that person still carries the outcome.

You will work on the coherence of agent experiences across MFC: the interaction patterns, the moments of handover, the points where a person steps back in. Human judgement is not a fallback in this work. It is something you design for on purpose, wherever consequence or ambiguity means a person should hold the decision. The role requires comfort in ambiguous problem spaces and the ability to frame the right question before an answer is available.

You will do this alongside a globally distributed team of Engineers, Data Scientists, Technical Program Managers, and other Designers. None of it is solved by design alone.

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

Responsibilities

• Learn how people work today: what they are trying to get done, what they have to keep track of, where they hesitate, and what they do when a tool does not fit. Then design better ways for them to work with agents and the AI capability around them. This includes permissions, consent, delegation, revocation, and clear limits on what an agent may do and on whose behalf.
• Design so that people can see when an agent is at work and decide for themselves how far to rely on it. This covers how an agent announces itself and its work, how uncertainty is expressed, when escalation happens and when it does not, and what a review step must show for a person to be able to disagree with it.
• Design for supervision of the system while it is running. Someone overseeing several agents needs to work out which agent is doing what, why it did it, what it depends on, how far it has got, and when to step in.
• Design for the days it goes wrong. This covers override, rollback, correction, and how someone keeps working when a system is down or confidently mistaken.
• Set the quality bar for experiences and prove it with users. Included in this is task success, whether people could follow what happened, whether they could recover, and whether they are better off than before.
• Design how we see the estate as it grows. This covers what exists, what is being used, what is delivering value, and what has become redundant, through the catalogue, marketplace and measurement surfaces that make those judgements possible.

Qualifications

Required/Minimum Qualifications

• Masters Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, User Experience, Interaction Design, or related field AND 6+ years experience working in product or service design OR Bachelors Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, User Experience, Interaction Design, or related field AND 8+ years experience working in product or service design OR equivalent experience (e.g., demonstrated experience working in product or service design or using design thinking to solve problems).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in product or service design, in an in-house or consultancy setting, with demonstrable depth in agentic or AI-enabled systems. We are looking for evidence of craft applied at a systems level rather than to individual screens.
• Hands-on experience designing systems that act on a users behalf, and a view formed from that experience about how much autonomy to grant and when to withhold it.
• The judgement to choose the right research method for the question in front of you, qualitative or quantitative, and to know when a method will not answer it.
• Comfort with responsible AI principles and experience designing for safe uses of AI.
• Prototyping that goes past static screens and comfort with evaluation.
• Strong cross-disciplinary collaborator, able to influence and align across design, engineering, data science and product while holding the line on experience quality.

Product Design IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $274,800 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $188,000 - $304,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:

https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.