Principal Design Architect

We are hiring a Principal Design Architect to take on the hardest, most ambiguous design challenges at the center of that vision. We are a team of product designers, UX researchers, content designers, data scientists, and technical writers. Together with our PM and Engineering partners, we design product experiences that are trusted, human-centered, and easy to use, enabling our users to manage, protect and secure their digital environments with peace of mind. 

Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end to end, simplified solutions. The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft’s mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers’ heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. 

This is a senior individual-contributor role for a designer who thrives on strategic, cross-cutting problems rather than a single product surface. You will move fluidly from deep user research to design thinking and prototyping to cross-functional leadership, setting direction where none exists and carrying an ambiguous problem all the way to a shipped, validated solution. You will partner closely with design, product, research, and engineering leaders across the organization, and you will help our most strategic work scale beyond any one individual 

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.

• Own core strategic design challenges that cut across the entire Security UX, rather than a single feature or product area.
• Drive design thinking, concepting, and high-fidelity prototyping to shape and validate solutions with customers before they are built.
• Provide cross-functional leadership that aligns design, product, research, and engineering partners to turn a strategic direction into a shipped experience.
• Flex across the most pressing cross-cutting problems as they emerge, bringing structure and momentum to work that spans multiple teams.
• Help scale the team's strategic capacity so that our most complex problems are not dependent on a single designer. 
• Use the Design System as a creative medium, not just a set of components, evolving its visual language and fit-and-finish to meet new interaction models and product ambitions by showing what great looks like in exemplar experiences. 

Required/minimum qualifications:

• Principal-level design experience, with the judgment and independence to operate as a senior individual contributor without direct reports.
• Depth across the full design craft: user research, interaction and experience design, and rapid prototyping.
• A track record of cross-functional leadership on ambiguous, strategic problems, influencing partners without formal authority.
• Systems thinking, with the ability to reason about complex enterprise scenarios such as multi-tenant administration, RBAC, and partner ecosystems.
• Comfort setting direction in ambiguity and carrying a problem from research through to a validated, shipped outcome. 
• Experience designing for security, IT administration, or other complex enterprise domains; adjacent complex industries such as healthcare are welcome. 
• Familiarity with data-informed design and measuring experience outcomes. 
• Experience contributing to a shared design system or a composable, cross-product experience.