Senior Product Designer

Overview

The Fluent Design System team is redefining Microsoft 365’s design system for the AI era. As M365 Copilot evolves into a rich, multimodal productivity platform, Fluent is transforming from traditional design systems into an adaptive, model-aware design foundations—one that blends GUI precision with generative, context-aware behaviors at scale. As a Senior Product Designer, you'll help shape the future of how AI-native experiences are designed, built, and sustained at an ecosystem-level. This role sits at the intersection of design, engineering, and emerging AI systems, with direct influence over the patterns, primitives, and architectural decisions that power M365 Copilot and the broader Microsoft ecosystem. You’ll work within X3, a global, multidisciplinary organization dedicated to bringing humanity, clarity, and trust to AI-powered experiences. Fluent is a critical layer in that mission—providing the shared language, systems thinking, and technical rigor needed to ensure quality, coherence, and craft as AI reshapes productivity software.

What You’ll Do

As a senior individual contributor, you’ll operate both strategically and hands-on—driving foundational decisions while actively prototyping and exploring what’s next.

• Shape Token‑Driven System Foundations: Contribute to the design token strategy across taxonomy, naming, governance, and lifecycle management—ensuring Fluent’s foundations are coherent, scalable, and resilient across platforms, themes, and future system evolution.
• Systematize Visual Language with Intent: Help define and refine Fluent’s design language through art direction and systemization of color, typography, spacing, motion, and state—balancing expressive craft with repeatable, tokenized structure.
• Elevate Craft at the System Level: Apply strong visual design judgment to evolve core system primitives, raising overall UI quality, consistency, and polish across Microsoft experiences.
• Translate Design Intent into Scalable Systems: Bridge visual design and implementation by translating design intent into tokenized abstractions that scale across platforms, modes, and themes without losing nuance or clarity.
• Partner Deeply with Engineering: Work closely with engineers to ensure tokens and foundations are implementable, versioned, and integrated into design‑to‑code workflows—supporting durability, performance, and adoption at scale.
• Define Clear Guidance for Adoption and Contribution: Create practical guidance for token usage, contribution models, and system adoption—helping teams use Fluent correctly, confidently, and consistently.
• Lead Through Influence and Alignment: Align designers, engineers, PMs, and accessibility partners around shared system decisions, using influence, clarity, and collaboration to drive coherence across the ecosystem.

Why This Role Matters

Fluent is more than a visual system—it’s the connective tissue for how we work together. It's what allows Microsoft 365 to move fast without fragmenting. In this role, you’ll help ensure that as AI accelerates what’s possible, the experience remains cohesive, intuitive, and deeply human.If you’re excited by re-architecting design systems for an AI-first world, influencing how models and interfaces work together, and building foundations that millions rely on every day, this team may be the right place for you.Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We work with a growth mindset, lead with empathy, and build inclusive systems that help people thrive—at work and beyond.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design token strategy, including taxonomy, naming, governance, and lifecycle management. 

• Contribute to art direction & systematizing design language elements 

• Apply strong visual design craft to evolve system foundations and raise overall UI quality.  

• Translate visual design intent (color, type, spacing, states) into tokenized systems that scale across platforms and themes.  

• Partner deeply with engineers to ensure tokens are implementable, versioned, and integrated into design‑to‑code workflows.  

• Define clear guidance for token usage, contribution, and adoption across teams.  

• Lead through influence — aligning designers, engineers, PMs, and accessibility partners on shared system decisions. 

Qualifications

Required/minimum Qualifications:

• Master's Degree in Industrial Design, Product Design, Human Computer Interaction, User Experience, Interaction Des