Overview
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 Senior Designer in the Engines & Experiences Design Studio, you are the systems thinker behind how Microsoft’s commercial brands show up across customer, partner, media, and marketer experiences. You take strategic priorities and turn them into creative systems — identity, type, color, motion, layout, component libraries — that hold together across channels, audiences, and formats instead of being rebuilt campaign by campaign. This role asks for depth in visual design, brand identity, and social storytelling, and an unusually high bar for craft. You’ll define and evolve the visual language of our commercial brands so every touchpoint is intentional, refined, and emotionally resonant — then package it into guidelines and toolkits that let internal teams and agency partners produce on-brand work without you in the room. You’ll also bring fluency in AI-enhanced creative workflows, using modern tools to accelerate ideation, prototyping, and production — and to make the system itself faster to apply. You’ll partner deeply across marketing, product, and engineering, mentor designers on the team, and represent the studio in the forums where creative direction gets set. 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, Human Computer Interaction, Visual Communications or related field AND 8+ years experience in art design or a related art field working on computer games or entertainment OR equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- 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.
- 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.
Art IC6 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $142,800 - $296,400 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 - $331,200 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
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.
