Product Design Lead, AI Growth

Rippling; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a Growth Design Lead to shape AI adoption for admins and employees. You will guide growth experiments, define activated user metrics, and collaborate with PMs, data scientists, and engineers to ship AI-powered experiences.

You will own end-to-end design across onboarding, activation, and monetization, build scalable patterns, run experiments, and mentor designers, transforming how customers interact with Rippling's AI capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of end-to-end product design experience shipping complex, high-impact products from concept to launch.
• A portfolio of shipped work that measurably changed behavior such as activation, adoption, retention, or conversion.
• Experience setting growth direction for a whole product area and getting teams to follow it.
• Hands-on growth design across onboarding, activation, and monetization; B2B or AI products are a plus.
• Comfort with funnels, cohorts, and experiment design, and the judgment to spot misleading results.
• Daily use of LLMs and AI prototyping tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar).
• Strong interaction and visual craft; growth surfaces are often the first thing a customer sees.
• Clear communication, including explaining a test result to stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Drive design for AI adoption across Rippling, from admin setup to employee daily use.
• Define activated AI user metrics and guardrail metrics for retention.
• Build shared growth patterns to reduce duplicate work across product teams.
• Run experiments with PMs and data partners; evaluate results by impact on metrics and users.
• Design upgrade and usage-limit moments that feel fair and transparent.
• Engage with customers to identify where AI helps and where users drop off.
• Use LLMs to sharpen problems and prototype in code with AI tools.
• Raise the bar for growth design and mentor junior designers.

Skills

Growth design

Onboarding

Activation

Monetization

Funnel analysis

Experiment design

Communication

UI/UX craft

AI prototyping

Tools

Claude

ChatGPT

Cursor

Claude Code

Job description

About Rippling

Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system.

Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes.

We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

About the role

As the design lead for Growth, you'll shape how customers adopt AI across Rippling and come to depend on it. Thousands of companies already run HR, IT, and Finance on Rippling. The job is getting the admins and employees inside them to trust AI with real work.

Rippling is in a unique position to change how companies run with AI because it already holds so much of the company: who works there, what they're paid, which laptops and apps they use, and who approves what. AI with that context can take on actual operational work. Customers still have to choose to use it, though, and the growth patterns you design are how that happens. An admin tries something small, sees it work on their own company's data, and gives Rippling AI a bigger job next time. You will help customers see Rippling's idea of the future of work.

Designers at Rippling are product builders. You'll work with PMs, engineers, and data scientists to define problems and ship experiences that change customer behavior. The work here starts in LLMs to clarify thinking, moves into tools like Cursor and Claude Code for refinement, then ships to customers. You'll stay involved through testing and launch, and own the outcome with your partners.

If you've moved real numbers without cheapening the product, we want to talk to you.

What you will do

• Drive design for AI adoption across Rippling, from an admin's first setup to an employee's daily use.
• Work with PM and data science to define what an activated AI user looks like, and the guardrail metrics that tell you when a win is hurting retention.
• Build shared growth patterns (entry points, prompt suggestions, setup flows, upgrade moments) so product teams stop building their own.
• Run experiments with your PM and data partners. Read results with judgment, and flag the ones that win on the metric and lose with the user.
• Design upgrade and usage-limit moments that feel fair and never come as a surprise.
• Spend time with customers to see where AI helps them and where they give up on it. Turn that into priorities for the domain.
• Use LLMs to sharpen problems and requirements, and prototype in code with AI tools so you're testing real interactions.
• Raise the bar for growth design across the org. Share what you learn, including from failed tests, and coach designers who are newer to growth.

What you will need

• 8+ years of end-to-end product design experience shipping complex, high-impact products from concept to launch.
• A portfolio of shipped work that measurably changed behavior, such as activation, adoption, retention, or conversion. Show us the experiments that lost, too, and what you did next.
• Experience setting growth direction for a whole product area and getting teams you don't manage to follow it.
• Hands‑on growth design across onboarding, activation, and monetization. B2B or AI products are a plus, especially where the buyer and the daily user are different people.
• Comfort with funnels, cohorts, and experiment design, and the judgment to spot a result that’s misleading.
• Daily use of LLMs and AI prototyping tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar), whether or not you write production code.
• Strong interaction and visual craft. Growth surfaces are often the first thing a customer sees.
• Clear communication, including explaining a test result to people who were hoping for a different one.

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]

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.