Principal UX Engineering Lead

Job ID: 200047662Posted: 2026-08-31Location: United States, Washington, RedmondSalary: USD $142,800 - $274,800 per yearEmployment type: Full-TimeWork site: 0 days / week in-office – remoteRole type: Individual ContributorTravel: Less than 25%Profession: Software EngineeringDiscipline: Software EngineeringCompany: MicrosoftOverviewMCAPS-Core accelerates customer outcomes and business growth. By uniting product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and partners around a common customer mission, we help customers realize value faster and turn innovation into measurable business impact. Through deep technical expertise and differentiated go-to-market execution, we win competitively, capture market share, and scale repeatable growth motions. We differentiate through value creation - delivering world-class, AI-powered customer experiences that accelerate adoption, strengthen loyalty, and create sustainable competitive advantage, driving growth that outpaces the market.The Customer & Commercial Success (CCS) organization, an organization within MCAPS-Core, is the connected engine that turns Microsoft’s commercial strategy into execution at scale — making it simpler and faster for the field to win for every customer, in every segment, region, and role. The organization brings together planning, landing, execution excellence, services portfolio and delivery, and field activation across ATU, STU, and CSU to accelerate customer value, drive growth, and strengthen the end-to-end experience across every customer moment.The UX Engineer plays a critical role in bridging user research, experience strategy, design, and engineering to bring innovative AI-powered experiences to life. As a senior member of a multidisciplinary Experience Strategy & Design (XSD) studio, this individual transforms user insights, experience architectures, and product concepts into functional prototypes, reusable design patterns, and production-ready solutions that accelerate learning and influence product direction. Working across researchers, product designers, technical program managers, product managers, and software engineering teams, they help define, validate, and scale end-to-end experiences that balance customer value, technical feasibility, accessibility, performance, and security. Through technical leadership, rapid experimentation, and storytelling, the UX Engineer enables faster decision making, reduces implementation risk, and ensures experiences are realized with a high degree of quality and fidelity. This role extends the impact of design by translating vision into tangible experiences, advancing design systems and front-end capabilities, and creating stronger alignment between customer needs, business goals, and engineering execution. The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in front-end technologies with strong design judgment, systems thinking, and a passion for shaping the future of AI-enabled experiences.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.ResponsibilitiesLeads collaboration with multiple disciplines (e.g., creative team, program managers, developers, writers, UX Research) to define and iterate on new and existing product features as well as to make decisions on behalf of One Microsoft. Collaborates with leadership and team members, creates, and helps the team deliver product design results while also guiding the team's newer members. Influences stakeholders across disciplines (e.g., Marketing, Sales). Ensures that voice is needed, sought out, and asked for to promote optimal product designs. Connects dots between teams to enable collaboration, identifying opportunities to build on the work of others and leverage previous work.Influences design ideas to generate ideation solutions for complex products (e.g., involving many constraints, requiring holistic view of interconnected systems) through design meetings to improve product designs. Provides input on the strategic utilization of a variety of perspectives when ideating (e.g., Technology, Business, Marketing). Synthesizes complex and challenging ideation solutions into a concise articulation of user wants and subsequent solutions. Ensures the use and adoption of the latest secure codebases and design systems (e.g., content templates, icons, form design, UI controls, navigation models). Gathers updates in the industry and/or makes a case for acquiring systems. Helps others use codebases and systems, and drives consistency and alignment across multiple teams. Holds responsibility for large contributions to existing and new codebases, design systems, and themes. Integrates ideas from across teams.Leads the development of functional prototypes which meet needs at hand (e.g., speed, depth, fidelity) and solve complex challenges and security requirements, providing guidance to leverage previous work and create efficiencies. Advises other team members about what prototypes should communicate. Presents to teams (e.g., Design and Engineering), mid-level leadership, and/or customers to receive feedback and strengthen partnerships for iterations. Seeks to understand user needs and propose a design prototype, evaluate its usefulness, and determine next steps to ensure optimal product designs. Ensures prototypes are in accordance with company's brand, guidelines, and security standards, and leads the invention/improvement of guidelines when existing guidelines are unclear. Leads the development and/or enablement of front end design solutions, technical prototypes, tooling, and/or user interface systems (e.g., controls, animation libraries, utilities) for one or more products that they own. Leads efforts to build out design components (e.g., responsiveness, micro-interactions, register-transfer level) with code so they can be used by engineers. Evaluates and refines processes to inform organization-wide technical decisions, integrating security principles and standards. Advises others on how to take a user-center approach to experience design. Develops and shares best practices that emphasize accessibility, performance, reusability, and optimization for secure patterns. Champions collaboration between design and engineering to fill gaps. Contributes to initiatives that create opportunities for impact outside of their product area. Acts as an advisor for their team, leveraging their expertise and mastery of engineering fundamentals (e.g., interpreting designs, writing code, working with source control). Oversees design reviews and verifies code quality and security. Reviews documentation of validation efforts. Creates clarity and builds energy for stakeholders. Influences those outside of design. Espouses values as a leader. Provides oversight and guidance to their team. Owns accountability for team and product outcomes. Mentors team members in all areas of ownership. Ensures full understanding of the original design and vision, and links to established problem and/or goal. Demonstrates technical leadership through setting direction, influencing strategies, and developing innovative technical solutions. Is an expert and leader in the crafts of design and engineering. Acts a steward of creative work across their team. Interviews and screens candidates. Drives the integration of security across all design and engineering processes, ensuring secure-by-design principles are integrated at every stage, from ideation to implementation. Proactively addresses security in code writing, source control management, service creation, and maintenance, analyzing threats and vulnerabilities early in development to implement comprehensive security measures. Drives prioritization of security enhancements in product backlogs and develops strategies to integrate security requirements and feedback loops into product planning, ensuring adaptation to evolving security landscapes with a strategic approach. Leads thorough security reviews and quality assurance checks, anticipating and proactively implementing practices to protect against future threats and strengthen designs before implementation. Evaluates and aligns security best practices to provide secure user experiences and serves as a key advocate for secure engineering systems and tools throughout the organization. Leads and drives initiatives to establish secure codebases and design systems, innovatively integrating security perspectives into design conversations to reinforce comprehensive and strategic security foundations. Influences prioritization of product backlog and sprint management, and guides others on self management of commitments. Leads others in defining needs of large and/or complex product designs based on multiple factors such as user insights and the business needs. Leads team in identifying needs that are not spoken and includes them in end-to-end design plan and process. Guides others to develop a synthesis of user insights while upholding privacy standards and secure data handling practices and compares to data to identify larger issues that may not be apparent for user desires. Makes the case for investments in product designs to senior leadership. Collaborates with product owners and development team members to shepherd end-to-end experiences from concept to product shipment for large and/or complex products. QualificationsRequired Qualifications: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 OR 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 OR 8+ years experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production code OR equivalent experience. Additional Required Qualifications:6+ years experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production codeAdditional Preferred Qualifications: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 OR 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 OR 14+ years experience working in product or service design and/or shipping production code OR equivalent experience.6+ years experience shipping production-ready code as a result of a collaborative process.Experience as product owner or technical lead for a design system consumed by multiple product teams, including versioning, migration, and theming architecture such as dark mode or multi-brand support.Experience building AI development infrastructure for design work, such as an MCP server that gives AI assistants programmatic access to component documentation and design tokens, model-integrated prototyping workflows, or an internal platform for code-based design exploration.Experience designing or building AI product surfaces, including assistant, agent, or generative UI patterns.Experience embedded in a design and research studio rather than a single feature team, working horizontally across multiple partner engineering organizations. • 2+ years using AI-integrated design tools and design-to-code workflows that carry work from design file to running interface.Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $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: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.