Senior Director, Design - Model Experience

Microsoft Superintelligence team'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. This role is part of Microsoft AI's Superintelligence Team. The MAIST is a startup-like team inside Microsoft AI, created to push the boundaries of AI toward Humanist Superintelligence — ultra-capable systems that remain controllable, safety-aligned, and anchored to human values. Our mission is to create AI that amplifies human potential while ensuring humanity remains firmly in control. We aim to deliver breakthroughs that benefit society — advancing science, education, and global well-being. We are looking for a design leader who is obsessed with how AI feels — not just how it looks. You'll own the end-to-end design quality of our model's personality, tone, and user-facing experiences across MM Labs, Playground, marketing surfaces, and model personality specification. This is a player-coach role: you'll spend roughly 80% of your time doing hands-on IC work (model personality design, UX prototyping, interaction design) and 20% coaching and growing a small team of model and UX designers.Your team includes model designers with linguistics backgrounds who shape how the model speaks, responds, and behaves — and UX designers who translate that into product surfaces. You set the creative bar for both disciplines. The right person for this role has exceptional design taste and craft, a deep intuition for language and personality, and the drive to personally produce work that sets the standard for the team. This is a small team where everyone builds. There is no room for armchair leadership — you will be in the work daily, reviewing SFT data quality alongside your model designers, critiquing interaction flows with your UX designers, and prototyping experiences yourself. You will ship regularly, and your work will directly shape how millions of people experience our AI.