Product Design Lead, IT

Rippling; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 174,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Rippling is seeking a Product Design Lead for IT to define the design strategy and craft north-star experiences across the platform. You will partner with product, engineering, and research to translate ambitious bets into cohesive, scalable IT workflows.

This role requires building deep domain expertise, thriving in ambiguity, and delivering polished, intuitive experiences that empower IT admins and security teams while maintaining strong user trust.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of end-to-end product design experience shipping complex, high-impact products.
• Portfolio showing strong product judgment, systems thinking, and craft.
• Experience designing technically complex products with deep workflows, permissions, edge cases, or enterprise-grade controls.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term design vision for Rippling IT and evolve a cohesive platform.
• Shape domain strategy, identify high-leverage problems, and influence roadmaps.
• Lead design for new bets from discovery through early product-market fit.
• Design holistic experiences for IT admins, security teams, CIOs, and employees.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to turn difficult problems into simple experiences.
• Define patterns to make Rippling IT cohesive across products, not a collection of tools.
• Use AI and prototyping tools to accelerate exploration and prototype ideas.

Skills

End-to-end design

Systems thinking

Interaction design

Visual design

AI prototyping

Customer focus

Ownership

Storytelling

Tools

Prototyping tools

AI prototyping

Job description

About this position

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

At Rippling, design is central to our mission to free smart people to tackle hard problems. We build products that automate the operational complexity of running a business, from HR and payroll to IT and finance, so our customers can focus on what matters most.

As a Product Design Lead on the IT team, you’ll help shape one of Rippling’s fastest-growing businesses and most important strategic investments.

IT is one of the most complex systems inside a company, and one of the most critical. Employees need the right devices, apps, permissions, and support without friction. IT teams need security, compliance, governance, and control across a stack that keeps expanding with data, AI tools, and automated agents. Rippling IT unifies identity, devices, inventory, support, AI governance, and compliance on one platform and one data graph, so policy can be set once and enforced everywhere.

You’ll shape the design strategy for this domain, craft north-star experiences, and define the systems that make complex IT workflows AI-native, intuitive, sharp, and scalable. Success in this role requires a designer who thrives in ambiguity, develops deep customer and domain expertise, and brings clarity to systems with many dependencies. You’ll partner closely with product, engineering, research, data, go-to-market, and customer-facing teams to turn ambitious product bets into cohesive experiences across Rippling’s platform.

What you will do

• Help define the long-term design vision for Rippling IT, evolving a set of powerful product areas into a cohesive, AI-native platform for identity, devices, inventory, support, governance, and compliance.
• Work at multiple altitudes: shape domain strategy, identify high-leverage customer problems, influence roadmap priorities, and sweat the end-to-end details of flows, states, edge cases, and visual polish.
• Lead design for new product bets from discovery through early product-market fit, using customer insight, data, prototyping, and fast iteration to learn where Rippling can uniquely win.
• Design holistic experiences for IT admins, security teams, CIOs, and employees, making complex workflows feel intuitive without losing the control and depth advanced customers need.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to turn ambiguous, technically complex problems into simple, powerful product experiences that ship.
• Define patterns and interaction models that make Rippling IT feel complete, cohesive, and scalable across products, rather than a collection of disconnected tools.
• Use AI and prototyping tools to accelerate exploration, pressure-test ideas, and design the next generation of proactive, intelligent IT workflows.

What you will need

• 8+ years of end-to-end product design experience shipping complex, high-impact products from concept through launch, then iterating based on what you learn.
• A portfolio that shows strong product judgment, systems thinking, and craft: you can turn messy, ambiguous domains into intuitive, high-quality experiences.
• Experience designing technically complex products with deep workflows, permissions, edge cases, platform dependencies, or enterprise-grade controls.
• Technical curiosity and fluency, including comfort working closely with engineers on AI systems, platform primitives, model behavior, evals, agentic workflows, MCPs, or related technical concepts.
• Strong interaction and visual design skills, with the ability to move fluidly between long-term vision, systems-level thinking, and the detailed execution needed to ship polished product experiences.
• Relentless customer focus, with a habit of building domain expertise through research, customer conversations, product data, and go-to-market feedback.
• Excellent communication and storytelling, from crisp async writing to persuasive presentations that align teams around ambiguous problems and difficult tradeoffs.
• High ownership and bias toward action: you move quickly with Product and Engineering, unblock dependencies, and ship coherent experiences without sacrificing quality or user trust.

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.

Salary Information

The pay range for this role is: 174,000 - 290,000 USD per year(US Tier 1)