Senior Product Design Lead (AI & Conversation Design) at Replicant

About the Role

This role reports directly to the VP of Product, owns the entire product design practice, and includes two attached designers: a Conversation Design Lead and a Lead/Principal Product Designer whose role you’ll define and hire.

Approximately 80% of your time will focus on core product design decisions—owning high-leverage decisions rather than managing a team. You’ll be accountable for product design across every touchpoint: sales conversations, deployments, AI agents interacting with customers, and analytics operators review daily.

The remaining 20% involves designing and scaling the product design practice to increase design’s impact across the organization. You’ll help Replicant mature its design capabilities, which have previously been under-resourced in a sales- and engineering-led culture.

This is an opportunity to demonstrate the power of product design in transforming customer service through cutting-edge Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and AI-driven solutions.

Key Responsibilities

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Own the entire customer experience, including interfaces. This spans sales conversations, deployments, AI agents interacting with customers, and analytics operators review daily.

• Set the information architecture for a converging platform. Merge conversation intelligence and agent-building products into a unified system, defining objects, naming conventions, and navigation flows.

• Design and govern the design system architecture. Build a pattern language, document usage rules, and establish a contribution model for engineers to follow.

• Extend design influence beyond your team. Collaborate with product managers, delivery engineers, and solutions engineers to raise the bar on customer-facing experiences.

• Drive rapid prototype-and-validation loops. Engage with internal customers (e.g., contact center operators) to translate feedback into design decisions and refine processes.

• Unite product design and conversation design. Lead the integration of these disciplines and oversee the research practice that supports them.

Qualifications

WHAT YOU'LL BRING:

• Systemic and journey-oriented thinking. Focus on whether a step is necessary before deciding on controls. Experience designing across non-interface touchpoints (e.g., calls, emails, human-agent conversations).

• Strong HCI and interaction design foundation. Ability to reason from first principles about human perception, learning, and error recovery across voice, conversational, and graphical interfaces.

• Proven ability to drive change through resistance. Experience moving entrenched teams over months, not just influencing executives in single meetings.

• Human-centric leadership with business outcomes. Experience close to product management or deep collaboration with product teams. Ability to point to customer conversations that influenced key decisions.

• Design system governance expertise. Experience governing design systems, including contribution models, documentation, deprecation, and conflict resolution.

• Self-directed problem-solving. Identify unrecognized opportunities, prioritize them, and escalate issues appropriately.

• AI-native design practice. Hands-on experience using AI tools in design workflows, with clear opinions on their strengths and limitations.

• Leadership and influence. Ability to set direction, give constructive feedback, run critiques, mentor designers, and hire. Experience holding your ground with executives and customers.

Requirements

• Based in a US or Canadian timezone.

• 10+ years of product design experience, including 2-3+ years at the director or principal level.

• Experience leading or growing design teams, regardless of formal titles.

• Experience owning design for enterprise or operational products.

Nice-to-Have

• Figma fluency. Proficiency in components, variants, libraries, variables, and tokens to set standards for hires and work directly in files.

• Bridge between Figma and code. Comfort with tools like Storybook, shadcn/ui, Tailwind, Cursor, or Claude Code for UI-level changes.

• AI or conversational product design. Experience designing non-deterministic outputs, failure states, trust mechanisms, and recovery flows.

• Operational/contact center tooling. Familiarity with tools used in contact centers or operational products.

• Building design practices from scratch. Experience defining and scaling design practices in early-stage organizations.

• Multidisciplinary leadership. Experience leading designers across product, conversation, content, or research disciplines.

Perks

For all full-time employees, we offer:

• In-person connection: Company-wide offsites and team gatherings to foster remote collaboration.

• Tech & learning stipend: Funding for conferences, books, and courses.

• Remote by design: Fully distributed with no guilt over life events; trust-based work culture.

• Health & wellness: Flexible vacations, paid sabbatical after 5 years, comprehensive benefits, and a well-being stipend.

• Competitive compensation: Salaries and equity tied to impact in a high-growth AI company.