Senior Director, Design - Model Experience

Microsoft Superintelligence teams 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.
This role is part of Microsoft AIs Superintelligence Team. The MAIST is a startup-like team inside Microsoft AI, created to push the boundaries of AI toward Humanist Superintelligence — ultra-capable systems that remain controllable, safety-aligned, and anchored to human values. Our mission is to create AI that amplifies human potential while ensuring humanity remains firmly in control. We aim to deliver breakthroughs that benefit society — advancing science, education, and global well-being.
We are looking for a design leader who is obsessed with how AI feels — not just how it looks. Youll own the end-to-end design quality of our models personality, tone, and user-facing experiences across MM Labs, Playground, marketing surfaces, and model personality specification. This is a player-coach role: youll spend roughly 80% of your time doing hands-on IC work (model personality design, UX prototyping, interaction design) and 20% coaching and growing a small team of model and UX designers.Your team includes model designers with linguistics backgrounds who shape how the model speaks, responds, and behaves — and UX designers who translate that into product surfaces. You set the creative bar for both disciplines. The right person for this role has exceptional design taste and craft, a deep intuition for language and personality, and the drive to personally produce work that sets the standard for the team.
This is a small team where everyone builds. There is no room for armchair leadership — you will be in the work daily, reviewing SFT data quality alongside your model designers, critiquing interaction flows with your UX designers, and prototyping experiences yourself. You will ship regularly, and your work will directly shape how millions of people experience our AI.

Responsibilities

• Own the creative vision for model experience: Define and evolve how our AI models look, feel, speak, and interact across all surfaces — establishing a coherent design language that spans personality, tone, visual design, and interaction patterns.
• Do the work yourself: Personally produce high-quality IC output — whether thats crafting model personality specifications, designing interaction prototypes, defining prompt taxonomies, or building evaluation frameworks for response quality. You lead by example.
• Shape model personality and tone: Work directly with model researchers to define and refine the models character, voice, and communication style. Translate abstract personality goals into concrete SFT data strategy, quality rubrics, and evaluation criteria.
• Drive UX for key product surfaces: Own the experience design for MM Labs, Playground, marketing pages, and model specification tools. Ensure every surface reflects world-class design craft and a deep understanding of how users interact with AI.
• Coach and grow a small team: Manage 4-5 direct reports across model design and UX design. Set direction, run rigorous critiques, unblock your team, and raise the quality bar — while keeping your own hands in the work.
• Bridge linguistics and design: Serve as the connective tissue between model behavior (how the model responds) and product experience (how users perceive and interact with those responses). Ensure linguistic quality and design craft reinforce each other.
• Partner across research and engineering: Collaborate closely with model researchers, product managers, and engineers to influence model training priorities, evaluation rubrics, and user-facing capabilities from the earliest stages of development.
• Build evaluation systems for design quality: Define what "good" looks like for model personality and UX. Build rubrics, run evaluations, and create feedback loops that connect user experience insights back to model training.

Qualifications

• Bachelors Degree in Product Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, Communication Design, Linguistics, or related field AND 8+ years experience in product design, experience design, or a related creative discipline
• OR Masters Degree in a related field AND 6+ years experience
• OR equivalent experience (e.g., demonstrated track record of shipping design work that shaped product identity and user experience)
• 2+ years of experience managing or mentoring designers, with a strong preference for player-coach roles where you remained deeply hands-on
• A portfolio that demonstrates exceptional craft in interaction design, visual design, or content/personality design — with evidence of personal IC contribution, not just direction-setting
• Experience designing for AI, LLM, or conversational systems — or a demonstrated deep understanding of how language, tone, and personality affect user trust and experience
• Comfort working across disciplines: you can review SFT data quality with a linguist in the morning and critique a Figma prototype in the afternoon
• Track record of shipping products end-to-end in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you owned both the vision and the details

Product Design M6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $163,000 - $296,400 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 $220,800 - $331,200 per year.