Principal Design Technologist

Microsoft•Redmond, WA

16h

About The Position

As a Principal Design Technologist within the Power Apps (App Agents) team, you will be a visionary leader at the intersection of design craft, AI architecture, and enterprise software. Your mission is to define and build the future of "agentic experiences" for the Microsoft Power Platform, shifting from monolithic applications to composable, modular skills. You will be the primary design architect for how users and AI agents collaborate to build, automate, and innovate at scale. This is a "builder-first" role for a hybrid professional with a background in both Design and Technology. You will spend your time crafting a vision in the codebase, leveraging "vibe coding" and advanced AI orchestration, to transform complex business requirements into production-grade agentic solutions. You are not just building user interfaces; you are shaping the reasoning, memory, and capabilities of the next generation of enterprise AI. Your role will be all about defining the vision, proving, advancing, and evolving forward-looking UX concepts for enterprise products through prototyping and hands-on product work. A typical day for a Principal Design Technologist in the App Agents team is a high-velocity blend of technical craftsmanship and strategic provocation. You might begin your morning "vibe coding" in an AI-native IDE, iteratively refining the non-deterministic behaviors of a multi-agent workflow directly within the production codebase to ensure interaction fidelity and feel. By midday, your focus pivots to architect instructions for the MCP server to ensure agents can accurately discover and reason over business data to engage with users. In the afternoon, you may transition into a quality UX architect role, designing "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluation pipelines to benchmark the helpfulness, coherence, and instruction compliance of new features against designer-curated "ground truth" datasets. Your day concludes as a strategic bridge, mentoring the broader UX organization on AI fluency while delivering "unsolicited provocations" through high-fidelity functional artifacts that challenge product assumptions and push the platform toward an agent-first future. We moved past the era of 'Chatbots' into 'Agentic Systems.' We need a Principal Design Technologist who understands that in an agent-first world, the UI is no longer a static screen, but a dynamic negotiation between human intent and machine reasoning. You aren't just designing a product; you are designing the 'intelligence layer' of the enterprise. 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.

Requirements

Master's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Graphic Design, Product Design, Visual Design, Human Computer Interaction, or related field AND 4+ years experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production code.
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Graphic Design, Product Design, Visual Design, Human Computer Interaction, or related field AND 6+ years experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production code.
8+ years experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production code.
equivalent experience.
AI Mastery: Demonstrated experience building and shipping products that integrate LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini). Proficiency in prompt engineering, agent orchestration, and working with model APIs.
Technical Depth: Proficiency in modern web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/TypeScript, React).
Protocol Fluency: Understanding of web architecture, REST APIs, and emerging standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Systemic Thinking: Experience contributing to or managing large-scale design systems. Familiarity with design-to-code automation and component metadata frameworks.
Communication: Exceptional written and visual communication skills. Ability to influence senior stakeholders and convey complex technical integrations to non-technical audiences.

Nice To Haves

Master's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Graphic Design, Product Design, Visual Design, Human Computer Interaction, or related field AND 8+ years experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production code.
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Graphic Design, Product Design, Visual Design, Human Computer Interaction, or related field AND 12+ years of experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production code.
14+ years experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production code.
equivalent experience.
6+ years experience shipping production-ready code as a result of a collaborative process.
Experience with the Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio).
Familiarity with agentic evaluation frameworks (e.g., τ-Bench, SWE-Bench).
Prior experience in "vibe coding" workflows.
Track record of innovation in design prototyping methodologies and tools.
Experience with Azure cloud services and database architectures.

Responsibilities

Design Patterns & AI Semiotics (Primary Focus) System Design: Deconstruct agentic AI systems into core functional subsystems (Reasoning, Perception, Action, Learning) and define the reusable patterns that govern them.
Interaction Semiotics: Architect the "Sign Systems" for AI, defining how agents signal state, "thought process," and confidence. Establish standards for AI visual identifiers and conversational turn-taking.
Clarity of Thought: Establish requirements for "Explainable Rationale," ensuring every agent's action is grounded in a rule, preference, or prior user action.
Agentic Prototyping and Codebase Exploration Vibe-Code to Production: Lead the rapid prototyping of 0-to-1 agentic features directly within the production codebase. Use AI-native development environments (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Lovable) to iterate on complex UI/UX patterns that require real-time model integration.
Functional Artifacts: Produce "unsolicited provocations" and high-fidelity functional artifacts that challenge current product assumptions and reveal the technical constraints/opportunities of emerging LLMs.
Bridge Design and Engineering: Partner with professional developers to ensure that "vibe-coded" prototypes are translated into scalable, maintainable, and high-performance production features through clear Pull Requests (PRs) and technical documentation.
Orchestration Design MCP Architecture: Be familiar with the "connective tissue" that allows agents to discover and utilize enterprise data across Dataverse, M365, and the Microsoft Graph.
Tool Design: Design and optimize MCP tool descriptions, instructions, and schemas. Ensure that agents can reason for "when and how" to use specific business skills, maximizing intent fulfillment.
Pathway Design: Move beyond linear UI flows to design probabilistic "pathways" for AI agents. Define how agents maintain memory, handle multi-step reasoning, and gracefully recover from non-deterministic failures.
Model Evaluation and Performance Frameworks Quality Benchmarking: Define and operationalize the quality bar for agentic experiences by translating UX principles - helpfulness, coherence, and instruction fidelity - into measurable evaluation frameworks. Co-create “LLM-as-a-judge” systems that embed these standards into continuous, automated evaluation loops, enabling scalable, high-confidence iteration of AI-driven experiences.
Ground Truth Creation: Collaborate with Research and Design partners to build "ground truth" datasets and preference pairs for fine-tuning model behavior. Use qualitative user research to validate that agentic "reasoning" aligns with human mental models.
Organizational Upskilling AI Fluency Champion: Act as a force multiplier for the organization by upskilling designers, PMs, and cross-functional partners in AI tooling, prompt engineering, and agentic development patterns.
Design System Evolution: Drive the evolution of design systems into "intelligent systems." Ensure that all components, tokens, and icons are machine-readable and ready for agent-led composition.
Governance and Trust: Champion the principles of "Responsible AI." Ensure that all agentic experiences are built atop an enterprise-hardened foundation of governance, identity, and privacy.

Benefits

The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $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

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