Overview

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is the conversational core of Microsoft Copilot —where enterprise AI meets productivity. It’s the default interface through which users summarize meetings, draft emails, generate insights from enterprise data, and coordinate with teams using natural language. As Microsoft accelerates its AI-first strategy, Chat isn’t just a feature—it’s the gateway. It’s the most visible and critical surface for AI-powered work.

As the Principal UX Performance Architect, you will lead the design and evolution of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat client architecture to ensure fast, reliable, and scalable performance across Microsoft 365 surfaces. This role combines massive surface area and impact—your work directly shapes the foundation of Copilot Chat—with strategic depth and systems thinking, demanding precision in memory modeling, performance tuning, and regression prevention. You’ll exercise cross-org influence and technical leadership, collaborating in true One Microsoft fashion with world-class PMs, designers, data scientists, and engineering teams to land high-leverage, cross-suite solutions. With Chat serving as the front door to Copilot’s AI capabilities, performance becomes a foundational requirement—not just for responsiveness, but for trust, stability, and user satisfaction. You will architect solutions for a product at the epicenter of Microsoft, making technical investments that align with measurable business outcomes and maximize customer value. If you are excited about UX performance, driving telemetry innovation, and shaping the technical foundation of AI-powered productivity experiences, this is your opportunity to lead from the front.

This role requires you to be onsite 3 days a week in Microsoft's offices in Redmond, WA.

Microsoft’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.

Responsibilities

Tune application performance and memory management across Chat client surfaces (e.g., M365 Copilot, Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.), optimizing runtime memory health, working set efficiency, and performance under diverse workloads.
Lead memory health initiatives, including memory gates, automated regression detection, and tooling to isolate and resolve issues quickly, ensuring visibility into memory behavior.
Build advanced analytics and debuggability systems enabling rich and scalable trace and heap snapshot collection, stack inspection and retainer path analysis.
Drive cross-team collaboration with runtime partners (e.g., Edge), platform teams, and feature owners to improve garbage collection, reference handling, and memory protection.
Mentor engineers and influence technical direction across the M365 Copilot Chat Fundamentals org, fostering a culture of memory excellence, performance, and continuous learning.
Model our culture of growth mindset, clarity, accountability, and inclusive behaviors, removing systemic blockers so your team ships with agility and quality.
Embody our culture and values.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python - OR equivalent experience.
6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 4+ years focused on frontend development using React and TypeScript.
3+ years of proven track record of leading architecture and performance initiatives with a focus on application memory in large-scale systems.
4+ years experience of React fundamentals and understanding of component lifecycle, state management, and performance optimization techniques.
3+ years of demonstrated experience in memory profiling, heap analysis, and runtime performance tuning.

Other Requirements: Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: - Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

Exposure to CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions), cloud hosting (e.g., Azure CDN, Micro services), and monitoring tools.
Familiarity with server-side rendering techniques and performance tools like Chrome DevTools,and React Profiler. - Security, compliance, privacy‑by‑design mindset; experience with cost‑aware engineering and performance optimization.
Experienced collaborating with PM and design; communicates clearly with both technical and non-technical audiences.

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Software Engineering IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $139,900 - $274,800 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 - $304,200 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, read more about requesting accommodations.