Principal Design Engineer, Interactive Graphics, Copilot

** Overview*
* About AIx Design & Research

If you're curious, creative, and excited by how AI is reshaping the practice of design, we'd love to work with you! The AI Experiences Design & Research team is a community of designers, researchers, and makers reimagining how people interact with technology. We design across Microsoft's AI-powered experiences, including Copilot, Edge, Bing, MSN, and emerging products, creating end-to-end journeys that span devices, platforms, and contexts.

We're looking for people who embrace experimentation, use new tools to expand what's possible, and aren't afraid to move beyond traditional design boundaries. Together, we're building experiences that make AI more useful, intuitive, and delightful for billions of people around the world. Join us as we reimagine not only the products people use, but the future of design itself!

The opportunity

We're looking for a hands-on design engineer who thinks like an artist and builds for the browser. On the Copilot Design team at Microsoft, you'll originate a distinctive visual point of view and turn it into expressive, useful interactive experiences. Composition, typography, light, material, timing and physical behavior are part of your design vocabulary;
JavaScript, shaders and real-time rendering are part of your medium.

This is a specialist role for someone who can invent the experience and code it, not only implement a finished design. You'll work across artistic exploration and production engineering, balancing surprise and delight with clarity, accessibility and responsiveness. The work asks for both ambition and restraint: know when motion makes an interaction more understandable, and when a quieter experience serves people better.

** Responsibilities*
* + Conceive, sketch in code and refine distinctive interactive experiences. Make artistic decisions about composition, typography, light, material, rhythm and physical behavior, then test how those choices work in a real interface.

+ Create code-driven motion, custom shaders and procedural or generative visuals that respond to user input and product state. Design coherent transitions and behaviors, not just isolated effects.

+ Explore useful assistant interactions such as activity and progress, transitions, interruption and feedback. These are illustrative opportunities to investigate, not a commitment to a particular product roadmap.

+ Develop production-ready components and partner with product engineering on integration, testing and maintenance. Carry the visual intent through implementation, including state changes, edge cases and graceful degradation.

+ Turn successful explorations into reusable motion and graphics primitives, components and tools. Document the artistic and technical choices so other designers and engineers can extend the work without losing its character.

+ Profile CPU and GPU work, frame time, memory, loading and input responsiveness. Build accessible, reduced-motion and non-GPU alternatives, and validate behavior across browsers, devices and different levels of graphics capability.

+ Set a high creative and technical craft bar while staying hands-on. Mentor through critique and code review, explain trade-offs clearly and help partners choose purposeful expression over unnecessary spectacle.

** Qualifications*
* We value demonstrated craft and ownership, whether developed through professional roles, independent practice, open-source work or self-directed learning. Equivalent practical experience and nontraditional paths are welcome. The specialist capabilities below matter more than having used every tool in a particular stack.

Required skills:

+ 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.

Preferred

Skills & Experience:

+ A portfolio showing original artistic direction and the ability to originate, develop and iterate visual ideas in code. You can explain why your choices in composition, typography, light, material and motion…