AI Interactions Designer

Circle Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay and equity

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Access to frontier AI Engines

Job summary

Circle Labs in San Francisco seeks a designer to shape how shapes participate in conversation and work with people. You will focus on the behavior of collaborative AI, ensuring responses stay aligned with user intent and keep control in user hands.

You’ll prototype interaction patterns, evaluate edge cases, and collaborate with product designers, researchers, and engineers to ship intuitive agents that help groups set goals, delegate tasks, and track progress together.

Qualifications

• Examples of conversational or AI interaction work showing intended behavior, tests, and results.
• Strong writing and conversation design skills, including explaining complex actions and uncertainty.
• Hands-on experience prototyping with AI Engines and understanding how context, instructions, and tools affect behavior.
• Ability to turn subjective feedback into clear examples, evaluation criteria, and useful comparisons.
• Comfort collaborating with designers, engineers, and researchers across conversations.

Responsibilities

• Prototype how shapes participate in conversations with multiple people and other shapes, tracking who spoke and when.
• Prototype how shapes delegate to specialist shapes and external agents, including handoffs and progress.
• Build working prototypes with prompts, conversation examples, and lightweight code for real AI Engines.
• Create evaluation scenarios for conflicting requests, permissions, changing plans, lost context, and incomplete results.
• Review interaction failures with researchers and engineers, distinguishing interface from behavior problems.
• Partner with product designers to align interface and a shape's responses, then evaluate the experience after shipping.

Skills

Conversational AI design

Strong writing

AI prototyping

Context handling

Feedback to test cases

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Python

JavaScript

Job description

About Circle Labs

Circle Labs is the company behind shapes.inc, a place to collaborate. We’re building multiplayer AI: shapes are collaborative assistants that take part in group conversations and do things with you and your people. Our next work includes helping groups set shared goals, delegate to specialist shapes and external agents, and follow progress through to completion. Making things, figuring things out, and sharing plans give people more reasons to spend time together.

We’re a small team in San Francisco. We use the product every day, talk to users, and work across design, engineering, and research.

About the role

Design how shapes participate in conversation and do things with people. You will work on the behavior of these collaborative assistants: how they understand a group, contribute at the right moment, explain their actions, and respond to feedback while people stay in control of the shared experience.

What you’ll do

• Prototype how shapes participate in conversations with multiple people and other shapes: keeping track of who said what, responding at the right moment, and leaving room for people to talk to each other.
• Prototype how shapes delegate to specialist shapes and external agents, including handoffs, progress, interruptions, recovery, and a clear account of what actually happened.
• Build working prototypes with prompts, conversation examples, and lightweight code so the team can try behaviors with real AI Engines.
• Create evaluation scenarios for conflicting requests, different access permissions, changing plans, lost context, and incomplete results during collaboration.
• Review interaction failures with researchers and engineers, separate interface problems from behavior problems, and turn findings into testable changes.
• Partner with product designers to make the interface and a shape's responses work together, then evaluate the experience after it ships.

What you’ll bring

• Examples of conversational or AI interaction work that show the behavior you intended, how you tested it, and what improved.
• Strong writing and conversation design skills, including the ability to make complex actions and uncertainty understandable.
• Hands‑on experience prototyping with AI Engines and an understanding of how context, instructions, and tools affect their behavior.
• The ability to turn subjective feedback about an interaction into clear examples, evaluation criteria, and useful comparisons.
• Comfort working with designers, engineers, and researchers to iterate on behavior across many possible conversations.

Nice to have

• Experience with group conversation, voice interfaces, or assistants that use tools.
• The ability to build small evaluation or prototyping tools in Python or JavaScript.
• Experience studying conversational repair, social cues, or how people form expectations of an assistant.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and equity
• Health, dental, and vision coverage
• Access to frontier AI Engines