Principal User Experience Researcher (UXR) at Microsoft

As a Principal User Experience Researcher (UXR) at Microsoft, you will lead research strategy and execution for products that impact millions globally, particularly in the AI-powered skilling and learning experiences domain. Your role involves identifying critical customer issues to inform product strategy, overseeing complex research programs using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and transforming research insights into actionable product recommendations. You will be responsible for defining key user experience metrics, creating scalable research systems, and ensuring that solutions are intuitive, impactful, and inclusive. This senior individual contributor role requires a high degree of autonomy to drive research strategy, mentor others, and influence product direction across multiple product areas or significant feature sets. You will collaborate closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Engineering leads to shape the future of AI-driven learning and productivity tools, ensuring user-centricity and driving user engagement and habit formation. This role bridges traditional UX research with growth operations principles, requiring a deep understanding of user adoption, engagement, and retention strategies, as well as funnel optimization and onboarding patterns. You will be instrumental in advancing AI-powered experiences for time management, calendar applications, and AI chat interactions, moving between exploratory and rapid evaluative research. Your ability to work across organizational roles to uncover unspoken questions and provide precise, detailed, and durable answers will be crucial. A strong mixed-methods research background, comfort with interviews, and deep data analysis skills are essential for success in this role, which demands a focus on user needs, problems, goals, and aspirations to deliver direct, tangible product impact.