Full-time opportunities for students & recent graduates: User Experience

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. We believe we should each find meaning in our work and we ensure employees have the freedom and the reach to help make a difference in the world.

We are looking for candidates who are:

Team Players: driving digital transformation with our customers is a team sport. We need teammates who can stay maniacally focused on our customers’ satisfaction while operating in a highly-collaborative, matrixed global organization.
Growth Mindset: your life is truly about learning-it-all. You approach every new piece of information, knowledge, and competency with insatiable curiosity. Ultimately, you’re open to the ideas of others, where the success of others does not diminish your own.

Relentlessly Resourceful: you have the drive to overcome any obstacle in your work.
Customer Obsessed: you learn about your customers and their businesses with a beginner’s mind and then bring solutions that meet their needs.
Pure Challenge: demonstrated desire and ability to readily take on complex challenges and work towards solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems.
Passion for Technology: you’re deeply motivated by the incredible opportunity of how technology can inspire and ignite change and renewal.

Applications to these opportunities are considered for all available User Experience roles including the ones described below, depending on education level and/or location. To be considered as a student or recent graduate, you should be within 12 months of graduation or graduated within the last 12 months.

User experience designer

Innovate and improve some of the most popular software products in the world. Our mission is to think end-to-end about the user experience, both broadly and deeply. Giving end users an experience without problems isn’t good enough; we want the experience to be immersive and pleasing for each and every customer. We need to know our users and understand their perceptions, desires, needs, frustrations, environments and problems related to Microsoft devices and services

User experience researcher

Our mission is to think end-to-end about the user experience, both broadly and deeply. Giving end users an experience without problems isn’t good enough; we want the experience to be immersive and pleasing for each and every customer. We need to know our users and understand their perceptions, desires, needs, frustrations, environments and problems related to Microsoft devices and services. We need people who are passionate about finding creative ways to evangelize the rich research data we have to both internal and external audiences, and who want to drive the results of those communications to the final experience.

Responsibilities

User experience designer

As a User Experience designer, you are responsible for driving cross-team collaboration with the world’s best user experience researchers, program managers, product planners and developers from the early stages of planning through implementation. You’ll need to think strategically, be creative and negotiate design solutions in relation to business goals. Using your abilities to identify new opportunities and generate innovative ideas, you will influence the design direction and make our already popular products even more successful.

User experience researcher

As a User Experience researcher, you are responsible for driving cross-team collaboration with the world’s best user experience designer, program managers, product planners and developers from the early stages of planning through implementation. You’ll need to think strategically, be creative and negotiate design solutions in relation to business goals.

Qualifications

A bachelor’s, master’s or PhD degree in computer science, human-computer interaction, industrial or graphic design or related field within 12 months of graduation or graduated within the last 12 months.
Ability to apply strategic, business-building approach to user experience designs while integrating user research and usability evaluation throughout.

Strong problem-solving skills with balanced interaction and visual design skills.
One or two years of work experience or classroom experience evolving design solutions from hand sketched ideas to interactive director, HTML or flash prototypes.
One or two years of practical work experience in JavaScript, Lingo and ActionScript knowledge preferred.
Excellent communication and presentation skills as well as self-confidence.
Knowledge of methods for gathering and analyzing UX research data.

The ability to solve complex UI design problems, take action and drive for results in a multi-disciplinary team

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, national origin, marital status, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other protected status.