Founding Product Designer

Salient; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Generous 401(k)

Catered lunches

Job summary

Salient is hiring its first product designer to shape the next phase of the product. You’ll partner with product, engineering, customers, and leadership to improve how customers build, manage, monitor, and improve our AI agents.

This hands-on role has broad ownership, guiding ideas from concept through launch and establishing the design foundation as the product grows. You’ll work closely with customers and engineers to ship quickly.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of product design experience.
• Experience designing AI-powered products, agents, copilots, or human-in-the-loop systems.
• Experience designing complex B2B, enterprise, or technical products.
• A portfolio showing work you personally owned from an ambiguous problem through launch.
• Strong interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and systems thinking.
• Experience designing monitoring, analytics, evaluation, or exception-management workflows.
• Experience working directly with customers and using feedback to shape the product.
• A track record of influencing product decisions rather than only executing requirements.
• Experience building or significantly improving a design system.
• Ability to design complete workflows, including permissions, edge cases, errors, and operational states.
• An understanding of how non-deterministic AI behavior affects trust, control, and product design.
• Experience partnering closely with engineers through implementation.
• Comfort using AI-assisted tools to prototype and explore ideas quickly.
• Strong communication and product judgment.
• Ability to work independently and create structure in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities

• Own product design from customer research and early concepts through launch and iteration.
• Design how customers configure, test, launch, monitor, and improve AI agents.
• Build workflows for conversation review, quality assurance, approvals, escalations, and human intervention.
• Improve how our agents communicate across voice, text, chat, and email.
• Make agent performance, behavior, and outcomes clear to customers.
• Simplify complex, data-heavy servicing workflows.
• Work directly with customers to understand their needs and test new ideas.
• Partner closely with product and engineering to shape priorities and ship quickly.
• Build Salient’s design system and shared product patterns.
• Create a consistent experience across our five live agents and future products.
• Use Figma, rapid prototypes, and AI tools to test ideas quickly.
• Help define how the design function grows over time.

Skills

Product design

AI-powered products

B2B enterprise design

Portfolio ownership

Interaction design

Systems thinking

Monitoring workflows

Customer collaboration

Product decisions influence

Design systems

Workflow design

Tools

Figma

Prototyping tools

AI prototyping tools

Job description

About Us

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.

We are:

• Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding
• Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years
• Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry
• Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day
• Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions
• Actively expanding into new financial services segments
• Building together in person in San Francisco

We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.

We are hiring our first product designer to shape the next phase of the product. You will work directly with product, engineering, customers, and leadership to improve how customers build, manage, monitor, and improve our agents.

This is a hands-on role with broad ownership. You will help determine what we build, take projects from early ideas through launch, and establish the design foundation we need as the product grows.

What you’ll do

• Own product design from customer research and early concepts through launch and iteration
• Design how customers configure, test, launch, monitor, and improve AI agents
• Build workflows for conversation review, quality assurance, approvals, escalations, and human intervention
• Improve how our agents communicate across voice, text, chat, and email
• Make agent performance, behavior, and outcomes clear to customers
• Simplify complex, data-heavy servicing workflows
• Work directly with customers to understand their needs and test new ideas
• Partner closely with product and engineering to shape priorities and ship quickly
• Build Salient’s design system and shared product patterns
• Create a consistent experience across our five live agents and future products
• Use Figma, rapid prototypes, and AI tools to test ideas quickly
• Help define how the design function grows over time

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years of product design experience
• Experience designing AI-powered products, agents, copilots, or human-in-the-loop systems
• Experience designing complex B2B, enterprise, operational, or technical products
• A portfolio showing work you personally owned from an ambiguous problem through launch
• Strong interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and systems thinking
• Experience designing monitoring, analytics, evaluation, or exception-management workflows
• Experience working directly with customers and using feedback to shape the product
• A track record of influencing product decisions rather than only executing requirements
• Experience building or significantly improving a design system
• Ability to design complete workflows, including permissions, edge cases, errors, and operational states
• An understanding of how non-deterministic AI behavior affects trust, control, and product design
• Experience partnering closely with engineers through implementation
• Comfort using AI-assisted tools to prototype and explore ideas quickly
• Strong communication and product judgment
• Ability to work independently and create structure in a fast-moving environment

At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.

We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees:

• medical, dental, and vision coverage
• generous 401(k)
• and catered lunches

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