Design Lead

Design Lead

At Microsoft, we're building a modern, AI-forward marketing organization that learns faster, activates smarter, and drives measurable impact. Our approach blends human creativity with AI-powered insights to fuel bold, culturally inspired creative strategies at scale. We prioritize outcomes over outputs, embrace rapid learning loops, and operate in agile flight formations that unite disciplines across Commercial Brand, Creative, and Customer Marketing. As a Design Lead - in Microsoft's Design Studio for the Engines & Experiences (E&E) organization, you will help shape the creative vision, brand identities, design systems and execution across a portfolio of initiatives and experiences. You will play a pivotal role in translating strategic priorities into compelling creative systems that scale across channels, audiences, and formats. This role demands deep expertise in visual design, brand identity, and creative storytelling, with a relentless focus on craft, quality, and detail. You will be responsible for elevating the visual language of Microsoft's commercial brands, ensuring every touchpoint is intentional, refined, and emotionally resonant. You'll lead the development of scalable design systems that unify brand expression across digital, experiential, and social platforms. You will also bring fluency in AI-enhanced creative workflows, using modern tools to accelerate ideation, prototyping, and production. You'll collaborate deeply across marketing, product, and engineering teams to ensure creative excellence and consistency across every touchpoint. At Microsoft, our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more guides how we partner with customers to deliver trusted, impactful solutions. With a growth-mindset culture, we innovate responsibly and measure success by shared progress, people, teams, and customers. Join us to do meaningful work that changes the world and helps shape what's next for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Translate strategic goals into scalable creative systems — identity, typography, color, motion, and component libraries — that drive brand consistency across campaigns, platforms, and social channels.
• Lead visual design direction for a portfolio of initiatives spanning customer, partner, media, and marketer audiences, holding the quality bar from concept through final delivery.
• Define and evolve brand identity systems for Microsoft's commercial brands so they read clearly and resonate with global audiences across digital, experiential, and social surfaces. Build and maintain brand guidelines and toolkits that empower internal teams and external agencies to produce on-brand work at volume without per-asset oversight.
• Integrate AI tools into creative workflows — ideation, prototyping, variation, and production — and establish the reusable prompts, styles, and pipelines the studio builds on.
• Partner with marketing, product, and engineering to turn complex technology into creative that simplifies and elevates the customer experience, and fold campaign data and audience insight back into how the system evolves.
• Mentor designers and give clear, actionable feedback in reviews; provide direction to the Art team internally and externally, and lead partner reviews to align on vision.
• Represent the Design Studio in strategic forums, advocating for design excellence and user-centered thinking — and manage assets responsibly, tagging with sensitivity labels and optimizing secure, access-controlled storage.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or Certificate in Design, Fine Arts, Visual Communications, Human Computer Interaction, or a related art field AND 4+ years of experience in art design or a related art field, OR equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or Certificate in Design, Fine Arts, Visual Communications, Human Computer Interaction, or a related art field AND 10+ years of experience in brand design, art direction, or creative leadership OR equivalent experience.
• A portfolio demonstrating excellence in visual design, brand identity, and social storytelling — including at least one design or identity system you defined and scaled.
• Demonstrated systems thinking: evidence of building reusable creative frameworks, guidelines, or toolkits that other people successfully produced work from.
• Expert proficiency in Adobe Creative Suite and Figma, including component and library architecture.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools in shipped creative work — ideation, generation, or production.
• Experience leading creative work across disciplines in a fast-paced, matrixed environment, and giving direct, actionable feedback to other designers.
• Experience building scalable design systems that span digital, experiential, and social platforms — and governing them as they grow.
• Deep fluency with AI tools for design, content generation, and workflow optimization, including establishing model-assisted production pipelines others reuse.
• Experience integrating campaign data, audience insights, and performance signals into creative operations and system decisions.
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills; able to inspire and influence at all levels of the organization.
• Track record of delivering impactful work inside organizations of significant scale and complexity, including directing external agencies and production partners.
• Experience mentoring designers and shipping 2+ major campaigns, brands, or products end to end.