Product Design Lead, AI

Rippling; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech company in the United States is seeking a Product Design Lead focused on AI to shape customer interactions and streamline operational workflows. The ideal candidate will have a strong portfolio demonstrating expertise in AI development and outstanding communication skills. This role involves designing intuitive AI interfaces and collaboration with cross-functional teams. Competitive salary and diverse work environment offered.

Qualifications

• Portfolio of complex products delivered from concept through launch.
• High-level competence in AI-enabled workflows and design of systems.
• Ability to think in systems and simplify complexity.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end Search & AI experience at Rippling.
• Understand customer workflows to drive design priorities.
• Deliver high-fidelity designs and interaction prototypes.

Skills

AI development familiarity

Visual and interaction craft

Excellent communication skills

Job description

About the role

As the Product Design Lead focused on AI, you’ll shape how customers find answers, investigate data, and take action across Rippling. From universal search to AI‑assisted workflows, your work will define how operators, admins, and employees navigate complexity and get to confident outcomes—fast.

Rippling is the software many businesses use to stand up and run their entire operation. With increasing complexity, deterministic nature, and wide variance of edge cases—the foundation of standing up a business will evolve to simpler patterns leveraging AI to help with policy building, data investigation, and the ins and outs of running a business day‑to‑day. We’re looking for a designer with extraordinary craft, deep familiarity and curiosity in the ever‑changing landscape of enterprise AI, and an uncanny ability to envision—and inspire others about—the future.

You’ll lead the design of a unified Search & AI platform that powers discovery and assistance across Rippling. Whether customers are self‑serve SMBs or managed enterprise accounts, searching for a single answer or orchestrating an end‑to‑end workflow, your work will make it simple. You’ll craft platform primitives—prompt and safety controls, evaluation loops, and reusable UI—that product teams can plug into seamlessly, while building customer‑facing experiences that are polished, explainable, and auditable. You’ll partner deeply with product teams to blend deterministic systems with probabilistic models, designing graceful fallbacks and human‑in‑the‑loop moments where it matters.

What you will do

• Design the end‑to‑end Search & AI experience at Rippling—from universal search to embedded assistants—crafting systems that are fast, reliable, explainable, and radically simple.
• Get close to customers to understand real workflows, identify where search and AI can remove friction or create leverage, and turn those insights into strategic design priorities that drive measurable impact.
• Anticipate future needs and edge cases, designing for global scale, strict permissioning, and compliance—while defining clear guardrails, fallbacks, and human‑in‑the‑loop patterns.
• Build reusable capabilities and systems—ranking and filtering, prompt governance, evaluation frameworks, and UI components—that scale across Rippling’s product suite.
• Partner deeply with Product, Engineering, Applied ML, and GTM to scope, prototype, and ship new functionality; run iterative experiments, define success metrics, and incorporate offline/online evals into the design process.
• Deliver high‑fidelity designs and interaction prototypes (including conversation flows) that make complex concepts crystal‑clear to stakeholders and, most importantly, to end users.

What you will need

• A portfolio of complex, high‑impact products delivered from initial concept through iteration and launch; we care more about craft and outcomes than years in seat. Confident candidates with strong portfolios are encouraged to apply—even without a traditional years‑of‑experience profile.
• Familiarity with the state of the art in AI development (LLMs, embeddings/vector search, RAG, tool/agent orchestration, evaluation/observability, safety/privacy), plus the curiosity to keep learning as the field evolves.
• Demonstrated high‑level competence in AI‑enabled workflows—designing the interplay of deterministic systems and probabilistic models, modeling failure states and recovery, and creating transparent, user‑controllable experiences.
• Proven ability to think in systems and simplify complexity, ideally with experience designing in challenging or compliance‑heavy environments.
• A strong eye for visual and interaction craft; conversation design and UX writing skills are a plus.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills—you write clearly, align cross‑functional partners, and can articulate trade‑offs and rationale to executives and engineers alike.

If you don't necessarily meet all of these requirements, we still encourage you to apply. Skills transfer in unexpected ways, and diverse perspectives often lead to the most innovative solutions.

Additional Information

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics. Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email [e-mail]