Digital Product Designer

Ajaia | AI Consultancy; New York (NY); On-site; USD 90,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive benefits

Job summary

Ajaia is hiring a Digital Product Designer to lead discovery and design for client engagements and Ajaia's own product suite. You will interview users, observe work practices, and transform findings into journeys, wireframes, and prototypes that engineers can build from.

The role is hands-on and design-led throughout the process. You will test designs with real users before code is written, maintain a high standard for how things look and behave, and work closely with engineers to ensure

Qualifications

• Runs discovery yourself: interviews, usability testing, and reading behavioral data.
• Translates synthesis into working prototypes quickly.
• Designs human checkpoints into workflows and collaborates with engineers.
• AI fluent: uses AI daily to research, synthesize, and prototype.
• Strong stakeholder communication and ability to challenge feature lists when needed.
• On-site in New York with client-site travel is expected.

Responsibilities

• Run discovery on client engagements: interview the people doing the work, observe how they work, and identify gaps.
• Create user journeys, wireframes, and prototypes that engineers can build from.
• Test designs with real users before production code exists.
• Push back on a stakeholder's feature list and explain rationale in actionable terms.
• Own the design standard across Ajaia's product suite for consistency.

Skills

User research

Rapid prototyping

Stakeholder management

AI fluency

Education

Bachelor's degree preferred

Job description

About Ajaia

Ajaia is an AI implementation consultancy and product studio. We help organizations move from AI experimentation to measurable return on investment across four practices: AI Strategy and Advisory, Workforce Training and Enablement, Process Optimization, and Custom AI Development. Our work sits with executives and the people who do the actual work, and it is judged on whether something changed in production, not on whether a pilot looked good in a deck.

Position Overview

Ajaia is hiring a Digital Product Designer to run discovery and design on client engagements and on Ajaia's own product suite. You will talk to the people who actually do the work, watch what they do rather than only what they say, and turn that into journeys, wireframes, and prototypes an engineer can build from. You will test the design against real users before a line of production code is written, and you will hold the standard for how everything Ajaia ships looks and behaves.

This is a hands-on seat: you do the research and the design yourself, rather than handing off between the two.

Compensation

$90,000 to $210,000 base, depending on experience, plus a performance bonus of up to 100% of base salary.

How We Expect You To Work

AI use is a core execution requirement at Ajaia, not optional tooling. You will use AI tools daily to move from interview notes to synthesis, from synthesis to wireframe, and from wireframe to something clickable. You are judged on what you keep from that process, not on how much of it AI produced. Staying current with new design and prototyping tools is part of the job, and so is knowing when a shortcut needs your hand back on it before a user ever sees it.

What You Will Do

• Run discovery on client engagements: interview the people doing the work, watch them do it, and find the gap between what they say and what they actually do
• Talk to users of Ajaia's own products the same way. The product suite is not exempt from the same rigor client work gets
• Synthesize findings into what people actually need, stated separately from what they asked for, with the evidence for each
• Design the solution: user journeys, wireframes, and prototypes that an engineer can build from without guessing
• Decide where a human has to sign off inside a workflow, and design that checkpoint into the product rather than bolting it on afterward
• Test designs with real users before code exists, not after
• Push back on a stakeholder's feature list when the evidence points somewhere else, and explain why in terms they can act on
• Own the design standard across Ajaia's product suite so a designer joining engagement three does not have to reinvent decisions made on engagement one
• Prototype with AI tools as a default, not a novelty. Know when the AI-native path saves real time and when it produces something you have to rebuild by hand anyway
• Hand off design work in a state an engineer can actually start from, and stay involved enough during the build to catch it when implementation drifts from the intent

Requirements

• Runs discovery yourself: interviews, usability testing, and reading behavioral data
• Moves from synthesis to a working prototype fast
• Designs the human checkpoints into a workflow rather than bolting them on later
• Comfortable holding a room when the evidence points somewhere a stakeholder does not expect
• AI fluent: uses AI daily to research, synthesize, and prototype, and can tell good output from slop
• Comfortable working directly alongside engineers through build
• No minimum years required. We hire on the work
• On-site in New York, with client-site travel for discovery work
• A bachelor's degree is preferred and is not a requirement

Nice to have

• A public portfolio or case studies we can look at before we meet
• Experience designing AI-native workflows, including where a human checkpoint belongs
• Consulting, agency, or professional services experience with concurrent clients
• Comfort with lightweight front-end implementation

Benefits

• Competitive benefits.