Experience Design Leader

Overview

The Frontier Transformation Framework helps our customers become Frontier Firms: organizations where work is owned end to end by small teams of people and the agents they direct. In that world, the human role climbs a ladder, from doing the work, to editing what the agent drafts, to directing tasks it runs in the background, to orchestrating a system of agents and stepping in only on the exceptions. How well that transition goes depends heavily on the experience: whether human-agent workflows are intuitive, accessible, and effective, and whether people can supervise, trust, and correct what agents do. Experience design is what turns agentic capability into something people can actually work with — and doing it at scale requires design leadership, not just design talent.

We are seeking an Experience Design Leader to lead the discipline that shapes how humans interact with AI agents across the transformation journey. In this role, you will build and lead a global design team, set the design vision and standards for conversational and agent experiences, human-in-the-loop interaction patterns, and the visual presentation of AI-generated insights and value. You will operate as a peer to engineering, product, business-architecture, and governance leaders, and you will represent design in executive and investment forums — ensuring design decisions balance automation with meaningful human control and connect to measurable business outcomes.

This is a role for leaders who are energized by an emerging design space, who can recruit and grow high-performing global teams, and who set a high bar for craft while keeping design accountable to adoption, trust, and value. You will define the operating model, design system, and interaction patterns that scale this discipline across the solution portfolio, mentor senior and principal designers, and help customers adopt AI-native ways of working. If you are excited by the opportunity to define what human-agent collaboration feels like — and to build the team and standards that deliver it at scale — this role is for you.

Responsibilities

• Set and own the design vision, strategy, and standards for human-agent experiences across the solution portfolio and align them to business and transformation outcomes.
• Build, lead, and develop a global design team — recruiting talent, growing senior and principal designers and design managers, and setting a high hiring and craft bar.
• Establish the design operating model, quality bar, and review cadence, and direct the design system and component libraries that scale across solutions and surfaces.
• Provide design direction for conversational and agent interfaces across M365, Teams, and custom applications, and for human-in-the-loop patterns that balance automation with user control.
• Guide the team in designing multi-step, multi-agent workflows and clear hand-off points, and ensure a consistent, trustworthy experience across surfaces.
• Set the standard for accessibility (WCAG) and inclusive design as an organizational discipline, and hold the portfolio accountable to it.
• Shape research and usability strategy across the portfolio, using evidence to drive design decisions and demonstrate impact on adoption, efficiency, and value.
• Partner at the leadership level with engineering, product, business-architecture, and governance counterparts to embed design into how transformation is delivered.
• Represent design with senior executives and customer leadership, and transfer design practice, systems, and standards to customer teams so they can sustain them independently.

Success in this role looks like

• A high-performing, growing global design team is in place, with a strong hiring bar and a healthy talent pipeline.
• A shared design system and standards are adopted and reused across multiple solutions and teams.
• User satisfaction, task completion, and time-on-task metrics show that hybrid human-agent workflows are effective and improving.
• Accessibility audit scores and compliance ratings meet or exceed standards across the portfolio.
• Design impact is visible to executives — people can supervise and correct agents with confidence, and design contributes to measurable adoption and value outcomes.

Qualifications

Required/minimum qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 10+ years experience in UX/UI design including experience leading design teams
  • OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field AND 12+ years experience in UX/UI design including experience leading design teams
  • OR equivalent experience.
• 4+ years experience managing multiple, complex projects or portfolios.
• 2+ years experience leading blended, multidisciplinary teams.

Additional or preferred qualifications

• Experience leading design at a team-of-teams level, including managing and developing other managers or senior/principal designers.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, build, and develop global design teams that innovate and drive change, and to set a high hiring and craft bar.
• Proven track record owning design vision and strategy for an enterprise or B2B product portfolio, and setting the standards, operating model, and design culture a team runs on.
• Experience influencing senior executives and customer leadership, and representing design in leadership and investment forums.
• Track record connecting design to measurable business outcomes — adoption, efficiency, and value/P&L impact — not only usability metrics.
• Deep grounding in user research, usability, and inclusive design, with the judgment to direct research strategy across a portfolio.
• Established leadership in accessibility (WCAG) and inclusive design as an organizational standard, not just personal practice.
• Ability to translate complex human-agent workflows into intuitive, trustworthy interfaces, and to guide a team in doing so at scale.
• Fluency with modern design tools (e.g., Figma) sufficient to direct, review, and raise the quality of the team's work.
• Experience leading design for conversational AI, agentic, or human-in-the-loop experiences.
• Understanding of prompt design principles and how people interact with generative and agentic AI, enough to set direction for the team.
• Experience defining supervisory or control interfaces for automated or high-autonomy systems.
• Strong data-visualization and information-design judgment for analytics, value reporting, and governance dashboards.
• Familiarity with the Microsoft Fluent Design System and Teams extensibility.
• Experience establishing a design system as a shared standard and transferring it to client or partner teams.
• Experience partnering at the leadership level with engineering, product, and business-architecture counterparts across a delivery organization.
• Recognized thought leadership in experience design (speaking, writing, or community building) that strengthens the discipline and talent pipeline.

Solution Architecture IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $140,500 - $268,800 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 $175,900 - $288,000 per year.

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

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.