OutSystems Job Description Principal AX (Agent Experience) DesignerAbout This Role As a Principal AX (Agentic Experience) Designer at OutSystems, you will pioneer an entirely new design discipline, one where the "user" is no longer mainly human. You will define how AI agents navigate, operate, and succeed within our platform, while ensuring human oversight remains clear, trustworthy, and seamless when needed.
This role sits at the frontier of the UX UAX AX evolution. Traditional UX designed for humans navigating screens. User-Agent Experience (UAX) designed for humans and agents co-navigating. Agentic Experience (AX) designs for agents operating autonomously. You will lead the internal and external AX frontier while bridging all three eras.
Working closely with Product Management, Engineering, AI teams, and Research, you will transform our platform into an agent-ready substrate: machine-legible, safe by design, observable by default, and cost-aware. You will define and design the new deliverables required for agents to use our tools.
As a principal-level leader, you will mentor designers in this new discipline, influence product strategy, and evangelize agent-first design principles across the RD organization.
The Mission: Move beyond "chatbots" and design the world's first truly agent-operable development platform. You aren't just designing screens; you are designing the logic, safety, and transparency that allow agents to build software autonomously.
Key ResponsibilitiesDesign the Agent Interface Layer
- Define and design the machine-operable substrate beneath/alongside the UI. Make inter-agent and agent to internal and external systems communication clear/intuitive/agent readable.
- Define and develop the new design assets required for AX, the experience artifacts, specifications, and governance frameworks that agents need to operate successfully. This includes operation contracts, behaviour policies, trust specifications, and evaluation criteria, deliverables that don't yet have established conventions and that this role will help invent.
Lead the AX Design Lifecycle- Own the end-to-end AX design process: Model Contract Constrain Observe Validate Run Learn Version.
- Define operability gates for every agent workflow: determinism, safety, observability, recoverability, and economics.
- Build evaluation frameworks: golden tasks, regression sets, and adversarial scenarios that gate every capability version change.
- Design for all three oversight modes, interactive, supervised, and lights-out, specifying the appropriate mode per operation and risk profile.
Bridge UX, UAX, and AX- Design dual-layer journey maps with human experience and agent operations as parallel swim lanes, identifying delegation moments and oversight touchpoints.
- Define an operating model for trust per operation: when humans interact, when they supervise, and when agents run autonomously.
- Champion dual legibility, every element must be readable by humans and interpretable by agents.
Shape Strategy and Practice- Influence product vision and department strategy for agent-readiness and AI-native design.
- Establish AX design standards, patterns, and best practices across the RD organization.
- Contribute to the evolution of the design system to support agent-facing components, semantic structures, and observability surfaces.
- Evangelize agent-first design thinking across Product, Engineering, and leadership.
Lead and Develop People- Mentor and guide a team of designers through the UX-to-AX transition, building fluency in semantic architecture, process modeling, and exception design.
- Drive reskilling from empathy-first to precision-first design: from user research toward process analysis, from emotional design toward semantic architecture, from session thinking toward system optimization.
- Foster collaboration and a shared vision for design excellence across all three experience eras.
Qualifications / What You Need To Succeed (Hiring manager provides)Required- 8+ years of experience in UX, Product Design, or related design disciplines.
- Demonstrated experience designing for complex B2B SaaS or platform products.
- Strong foundation in systems thinking, information architecture, and semantic design, the ability to design structure and logic, not just interfaces.
- Experience in building operating models and conceptual design.
- Experience working in and leading cross-functional teams (design, engineering, product management, AI/ML).
- Experience with the full design lifecycle: research, ideation, prototyping, testing, iteration, and delivery in Agile environments.
- Expert in Figma, Figma make, Cursor, Claude Code, Codex and modern design tools.
- Excellent communication skills, the ability to articulate complex agent-system interactions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Fluent in English, both spoken and written.
- An understanding or hands-on experience with Prompt engineering in software development;
- Familiarity with AI Native IDEs or AI Assistants such as Cursor, GitHub CoPilot, and Claude.
Specific to AX design- Agentic Logic Orchestration: Deep fluency in LLM patterns (ReAct, Chain-of-Thought) and the ability to design state-machines, tool-use contracts, and autonomous workflows that an agent can reliably follow.
- Systemic Reliability Exception Design: Experience designing for non-deterministic systems. You know how to architect "graceful failures," hand-off protocols, and recovery paths for when AI hits a hallucination or a tool-call error.
- Information Architecture (IA) 2.0: Mastery of semantic modeling and machine-legible design. You organize data not just for human eyes, but for vector embeddings, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and typed schemas.
- The Navigator Oversight Matrix: Ability to design across all interaction modes, from Interactive (Human-led) to Supervised (Co-pilot) to Lights-out (Fully autonomous) ensuring observability, auditability, and cost-awareness at every stage.
- Technical Canvas: You are as comfortable navigating API documentation, JSON structures, and capability contracts as you are in Figma. You treat the "substrate" of the platform as your primary design surface.
Strong Advantages- Knowledge of low-code platforms, software development processes, or IDE design.
- Background in process engineering, service design, or operations design.
- Experience with capability/contract design, API design, or developer experience (DX).
- Experience designing for trust, delegation, and human-AI collaboration patterns.
