Principal UX Researcher, AI Experiences

Microsoft•Mountain View, CA

14h•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal UX Researcher will lead mixed-methods research for Copilot Cowork, an AI experience that lets people delegate multi-step tasks and receive completed work. The role investigates who uses Cowork, what they use it for, which capabilities matter, where the experience breaks down, and what drives repeat use. It combines quantitative research—including surveys, behavioral data, and experiments—with qualitative research to identify users’ needs and friction points and translate findings into product improvements. The researcher will also contribute to agentic evaluations, comparing Cowork with competing agents on representative tasks people actually delegate. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role with broad influence across Product, Design, Engineering, and Data Science. The role sets the research agenda, informs product and quality roadmaps, communicates evidence and uncertainty to senior leaders, and helps mentor researchers and strengthen the team’s research and evaluation practices. Success in the first year includes establishing an evidence-based understanding of users, use cases, retention, and drop-off; creating a prioritized map of unmet needs and friction and improving the most important issues; establishing an experience benchmark across releases using survey and behavioral metrics; and running regular, real-usage-grounded agentic evaluations that report competitive win rates and inform the quality roadmap. Employees in AI Experiences who live within a 50-mile commute of a designated Microsoft Hub in the U.S. are expected to work from the office at least four days per week. This expectation is subject to local law and may vary by jurisdiction.

Requirements

Doctorate in a listed or related field and 3+ years of User Experience Research experience; or a master's degree in a listed or related field and 4+ years; or a bachelor's degree in a listed or related field and 6+ years; or equivalent experience.
Strong mixed-methods research skills, with quantitative emphasis, including survey design and sampling, experimental design, and statistical modeling such as regression, mixed-effects models, segmentation, and driver analysis.
Strong qualitative research skills in interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, and synthesis.
Hands-on proficiency in R or Python, plus SQL or KQL, for analyzing survey, evaluation, and telemetry data.
Ability to influence across functions and with senior leaders, communicate difficult findings, and resolve competing priorities.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Statistics, Human Factors, Anthropology, or a related field and 8+ years of user research experience; or a related master’s degree and 6+ years; or a related doctorate and 5+ years; or equivalent experience.
Experience researching AI-powered products, ideally products that take actions or produce work on a user’s behalf.
A track record of research that shaped product strategy and shipped experiences in ambiguous spaces, including generative research that uncovered new opportunities.

Responsibilities

Combine telemetry, surveys, and interviews to understand who uses Cowork, which tasks they use it for, how usage changes over time, and what drives return use versus one-time use.
Lead generative research, including contextual inquiry, diary studies, and in-depth interviews with knowledge workers, to identify unmet needs, potential jobs for Cowork, expected capabilities, and product direction.
Identify friction across discovering Cowork, moving from chat into a task, delegating work, following progress, reviewing outputs, and recovering from mistakes; quantify its frequency and cost to help prioritize fixes.
Measure how well Cowork capabilities meet expectations across users’ real workflows and identify capability gaps that limit trust, adoption, and repeat use.
Partner with Design and Product on concepts, prototypes, and usability studies; establish an experience benchmark using attitudinal and behavioral metrics and assess whether shipped changes improve outcomes.
Contribute to interactive side-by-side evaluations of Cowork and competing agents, including designing task sets, rubrics, and analysis plans; ground evaluations in real usage and translate losses into prioritized fixes for the quality roadmap.
Design surveys and experiments with sound sampling and sufficient statistical power; segment users, model drivers of satisfaction and retention, and connect reported experiences with observed behavior.
Use AI-assisted analysis to scale research where appropriate.
Set the Cowork research agenda with partners, influence roadmap and quality decisions with senior leaders, and communicate uncertainty and tradeoffs clearly.
Remain hands-on while mentoring researchers and raising the team’s mixed-methods and evaluation craft.