We9re building the design practice at Replicant, and this role leads it. You9d report directly to the VP of Product and lead a team of three including yourself: a Lead/Principal Product Designer you9ll help define and hire, and our Conversation Design Lead. The role is weighted roughly 80% hands-on in the work and 20% leading the practice. We mean that ratio literally, and we9d rather tell you now than have you discover it in month two. If you9re looking to move fully out of the work and into management, this isn9t that job. You should know the rest of the context going in. The scope is large from day one, the company is engineering- and sales-led, and design has been attempted here twice and under-resourced both times. You9ll meet people who are attached to how things already work, and moving them is the job rather than an obstacle to it. As the practice grows, this role grows with it. WHAT YOU9LL DO

• Own the whole customer experience, interface included. A customer9s experience of Replicant runs from the sales conversation, through a deployment our delivery team configures, into an AI agent that talks to their customers, and back out through the analytics their operators read daily.
• Set the information architecture for a converging platform. Our conversation intelligence and agent-building products grew separately and are now becoming one product. You decide what the objects are, what they9re called, and how someone moves between them.
• Own the design system9s architecture and the rules around it. The foundation exists - components in Figma and in Storybook. What9s missing is a pattern language, documented decisions about when to use what, and a contribution model engineers can build against. You set that architecture, govern it, and are accountable for it existing.
• Extend design9s influence past the work you do yourself. Much of the customer-facing experience here gets shaped by people outside your team: product managers, delivery engineers who configure agents, solutions engineers in demos. Raising the bar means influencing them, giving them something good enough to follow, and telling them no when it matters.
• Drive rapid prototype-and-validation loops. You9ll talk to internal customers, contact center operators and turn what you hear into design decisions, owning method as well as findings. You9ll create and drive a best-in-class prototype-and-validate loop.
• Bring product design and conversation design together. Our product is a conversation, so we9ve put both disciplines in one practice. You own how they come together and the research practice underneath both.

WHAT YOU9LL BRING

• You think in systems and journeys. Before asking which control a step needs, you ask whether the step needs to exist. You9ve designed across touchpoints that weren9t all interfaces: a call, a handoff, an email, a conversation with a human agent.
• You have a real HCI or interaction-design foundation. You can reason from first principles about how people perceive, learn, form expectations, and recover from error, rather than from patterns you9ve seen in other products. Voice, conversational, and graphical interfaces all sit inside our product, and we need someone who can move between them without starting over each time.
• You9ve driven change through resistance. You9ve moved an entrenched team over months, not just changed one executive9s mind in one meeting. You can describe what you were up against and what it took.
• You think in business terms without being asked. You9ve spent time close to the PM role, or worked with product closely enough that you think that way anyway. You can point to specific decisions that changed because of a conversation you personally had with a customer.
• You9ve governed a design system, not only built one. Contribution, documentation, deprecation, and the arguments that come with them. You can describe a time you told someone no and why. The governance matters more to us than how many components you drew.
• You find the problems and set your own priorities. You identify opportunities the team hadn9t seen and make the case for them. You converge without being pushed and escalate the right things at the right time.
• You9re AI-native in your practice. You use these tools in real design work and have earned opinions about where they help and where they degrade quality. You9ve built workflows or assets other people adopted.
• You lead people and hold a room. Setting direction, giving hard feedback, running a critique, growing someone9s craft, and hiring. You can also hold your position in front of executives and customers. Formal management experience helps; evidence that designers got better working with you matters more than a title.

REQUIREMENTS

• Based in a US or Canadian timezone
• 10+ years of product design experience
• Experience leading or growing designers, whether or not you had the title
• Experience owning design for an enterprise or operational product

We care about the scope of what you9ve owned, not years on a re9sume9. If you9re unsure whether you9re at this level, apply anyway. We9d rather assess it than have you self-select out. NICE TO HAVE

• Figma fluency on the system side: components, variants, libraries, variables, tokens. Enough to hold your hire to a standard and to work in the files yourself.
• Comfort moving between Figma and code (Storybook, shadcn/ui, Tailwind, or tools like Cursor and Claude Code). If you want to pick up UI-level changes yourself, that9s open to you with preview environments and engineering review.
• Experience designing AI or conversational products, especially where the output was non-deterministic and you had to design failure states, trust, correction, and recovery.
• Experience with operational or contact center tooling.
• Experience defining a design practice from close to nothing.
• Experience leading designers across more than one discipline - product, conversation, content, or research.

For all full-time employees, we offer: In-person connection that counts: company-wide offsites and smaller team gatherings designed to make remote work feel personal Tech & learning stipend: Conferences, books, courses - interested? We9ll fund them Remote by design: We9re distributed - no guilt about life events, we trust you to manage your calendar 3cb Health & wellness: Flexible vacations, paid sabbatical after 5 years, comprehensive benefits, plus a stipend to support your physical and mental well-being Compensation that matches your impact: competitive salaries in the company you9re helping to build Equity with upside: We believe in shared ownership-You9ll own a real piece of a fast-growing AI company