Principal UX Designer — Systemic Digital + Physical UX

Familiar Machines; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Familiar Machines & Magic seeks a Principal UX Designer to lead UX productization across app, web, and on-product experiences, creating a cohesive system that spans digital and physical touchpoints.

You will drive system-level design, establish a universal design language, and partner across teams to translate character into cohesive, shippable experiences while guiding through ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience leading complex UX products from definition through launch and continued evolution.
• Deep digital UX expertise spanning system-level experience design and detailed interaction design.
• Robust experience partnering with UX researchers and participating in diverse forms of user research.
• Strong design judgment and visual sensibility, informed by a sophisticated understanding of the evolving digital landscape and what makes experiences feel refined, distinctive, and appropriate to each platform.
• Significant experience shipping consumer products that bridge software and physical experiences; connected devices, robotics, wearables, gaming, automotive, smart home, consumer electronics, or adjacent categories are especially relevant.
• Deep experience establishing cohesive UX patterns and frameworks across multiple platforms and surfaces, beyond individual features.
• Strong leadership, judgement, and influence across multidisciplinary teams, with a clear UX point of view, and the ability to elevate product quality while navigating complex product, design, and technical tradeoffs.
• Fluency with emerging technologies, including AI, and a thoughtful perspective on their role in advancing UX design, prototyping, and product development.

Responsibilities

• Lead the translation of the Familiar's established product vision, behaviors, and use cases into a cohesive, launch-ready customer experience across the app, on-product interfaces, and supporting digital touchpoints.
• Define interaction patterns, system states, and frameworks that create a cohesive and scalable experience across the Familiar ecosystem, from system-level definition through detailed execution.
• Establish the UX visual language and design system across app, web, and the Familiar's embodied behaviors and expressions, translating FM&M's brand and the Familiar's identity into a coherent language for how the system communicates with people.
• Partner across Design, Product, AI, Software, Hardware, and User Experience Research (UXR) to translate the Familiar's intended character, personality, and behaviors into shippable experiences, while resolving cross-system dependencies through development, validation, and launch.
• Design for the realities of a physical AI product - including everyday interactions, system feedback, edge cases, failure, recovery, and support.
• Stay hands-on throughout development, using prototyping to explore, validate, and guide the experience through implementation while ensuring design quality and intent are carried through to launch.
• Partner with Product, Research, and Engineering to define how we evaluate the experience in-market and evolve interactions based on behavioral data, customer feedback, and advances in system capability.

Skills

UX leadership

System-level UX

Interaction design

Collaboration with researchers

Design judgment

Cross-disciplinary teamwork

AI fluency

Job description

Familiar Machines & Magic seeks a Principal UX Designer to lead UX productization across app, web, and on-product experiences, creating a cohesive system that spans digital and physical touchpoints.

You will drive system-level design, establish a universal design language, and partner across teams to translate character into cohesive, shippable experiences while guiding through ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.