Senior AI-First Designer

Appnovation; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Appnovation seeks a Senior Manager, AI-First Design to lead AI-first UX across cross-functional teams of engineers, strategists, and product owners. You will own agentic design systems, drive conversational UX, and ship patterns as code into the build pipeline, shaping enterprise AI platforms for scalable impact.

You will mentor peers, define problem statements, and influence roadmaps with measurable outcomes in adoption, task success, and trust.

Qualifications

• 7–10 years of progressive UX design experience.
• Extensive AI-driven design tool experience.
• Demonstrated Conversational UX design expertise (chat/voice).
• Experience designing Agentic AI workflows with human-in-the-loop controls.
• AI-first mindset; able to challenge traditional design paradigms.
• Experience shipping design system components into engineering pipelines.
• Hands-on accessibility leadership across platforms (WCAG 2.1 AA).
• Robust portfolio with AI-powered experiences and rapid prototyping.

Responsibilities

• Partner with engineers and product owners to deliver rapid prototypes.
• Lead the design of Agentic AI experiences and Conversational UX end-to-end.
• Document assistant behaviors: tone, responses, and safety cues.
• Own AI-first design system patterns and ship as code into build pipelines.
• Create interactive prototypes to validate workflows and risks with AI.
• Maintain design quality checks, guardrails, and accessibility standards.
• Develop reusable playbooks and pattern libraries for multi-agent workflows.
• Mentor peers on rapid prototyping, AI tools, and system integration.
• Influence roadmaps with measurable outcomes like adoption and trust.

Skills

UX design leadership

AI-driven design tools

Conversational UX

Agentic AI workflows

AI-first mindset

Design systems integration

Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)

Portfolio of AI-powered experiences

Executive communication

Job description

About Us

Appnovation is a global, full-service digital partner that combines Strategy, Experience & Design, Engineering and Managed Services. We build digital solutions that deliver real impact today and serve as foundations for future growth. Bold ambition. Practical action. Endless possibilities.

Individual contributor role. No direct reports.

About The Role

Join forces with Appnovation to deliver high-impact results for one of our key strategic partners - a global leader in their field. This engagement offers a unique vista into a world-class organization with exceptional opportunities for professional growth and long-term career advancement.

At our partner organization, the mission is to create breakthroughs that change patients’ lives, and the company has recently rebuilt its entire technology operating model to deliver on it. The organization is becoming AI-native and agentic-supported, putting enterprise AI platforms in the hands of all 80,000 colleagues, moving decisions closest to the work, and driving a deeper level of federation than most industry peers. For a designer, this is a rare, career-defining moment: a historic 177-year-old company rewiring itself around AI, feedback loops measured in days, and design decisions that shape how an entire company works and how medicines reach patients. We are seeking a Senior Manager, AI-First Design to drive the design of the platforms this transformation runs on.

This is an individual contributor role with real authority over the work. You will drive products from inside the cross-functional team, sitting with engineers and product owners daily to shape scope, define priorities, and push concepts to working proofs in days rather than weeks. You will personally deliver the work, own specific pattern areas of the AI-first design system, and ship them as code into the engineering build pipeline so the correct, compliant pattern is delivered by default.

Key Responsibilities

• Hands-On Design Partnership: Act as a vocal, engaged, and proactive design partner within a cross-functional team (engineers, strategists, product), delivering rapid prototypes that solve complex business problems.
• Agentic & Conversational Leadership: Lead the design of Agentic AI experiences (systems that plan, make decisions, call tools, and complete multi-step workflows with humans in the loop) and own Conversational UX end-to-end.
• Assistant Behavior Design: Design and document assistant behaviors, including tone and voice, grounded responses, refusal patterns, transparency cues, and trust-building interaction patterns.
• Design System Pattern Ownership: Own specific pattern areas of the AI-first design system (assistant UI components, conversation templates, disclosure components, escalation patterns) and ship them as code into the engineering build pipeline.
• Agent Simulation & LLM Collaboration: Create interactive prototypes that simulate agent behavior to validate workflows and risks quickly, partnering closely with Engineering, Data, and AI teams on LLM-enabled experiences.
• QA & Guardrail Management: Maintain the reference library behind automated design quality checks, including voice patterns, disclosure templates, accessibility checks, and regulated-content guardrails.
• Pattern Adoption & Standards Drift: Monitor pattern usage, override rates, and exception requests for your assigned surfaces; surface standards drift and refine system-wide standards based on real-world data.
• Playbooks & Libraries: Create reusable playbooks and pattern libraries for agentic workflows and conversational design (escalation, repair, safety responses, approvals, and multi-step task orchestration).
• Enablement & Mentorship: Proactively train and informally mentor peer designers and cross-functional partners on the rapid prototyping process, AI tools, and design system integration.
• Product-Minded Design Strategy: Act as a strategist who frames problems, defines hypotheses, influences roadmaps, and connects design decisions to measurable outcomes like task success, adoption, and trust indicators.

What We Are Looking For

Must-Have (Basic Qualifications)

• Experience: 7-10 years of progressive UX design experience with a proven track record of delivering high-impact digital products.
• AI Experience: Extensive experience working with AI-driven design tools and platforms, with a deep understanding of leveraging them for rapid prototyping and iterative design.
• Conversational UX Expertise: Demonstrated experience designing Conversational UX (chat and/or voice), including dialog flows, conversation state, repair/fallback patterns, escalation, and tone/voice guidelines.
• Agentic AI Workflows: Demonstrated experience designing Agentic AI workflows (systems taking action via tools/functions), including human-in-the-loop controls, approvals, transparency, and safe failure modes.
• Mindset: An "AI-first" mindset with a proven willingness to challenge traditional design paradigms and adopt augmented workflows to radically accelerate delivery cycles.
• Design Systems Integration: Experience shipping design system components and patterns (such as design tokens or documented components) directly into engineering pipelines.
• Accessibility Leadership: Hands-on expertise ensuring WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across a wide variety of digital platforms.
• Portfolio: A robust portfolio demonstrating experience with system-level design thinking, AI-powered experiences, and advanced rapid prototyping techniques.
• Communication & Leadership: Exceptional communication skills with a proven ability to lead without authority, manage ambiguity, and present/justify design decisions to senior leadership and diverse stakeholder groups.

Nice-to-Have (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience defining responsible AI UX patterns (transparency/disclosures, explainability cues, privacy boundaries, and trust/safety guardrails).
• Comfort using AI-assisted coding tools to prototype ideas, weigh implementation tradeoffs, and partner closely with engineering.
• Advanced product design experience partnering with Product and Engineering to prioritize tradeoffs and define measurable outcomes.
• Previous experience designing within the healthcare or pharmaceutical sectors.
• Experience with AI experience evaluation approaches (conversation quality testing, scenario-based risk testing, and iterative improvement loops tied to product metrics).
• Strong knowledge of service design, journey mapping, or customer experience frameworks.

Who You Are

• Continuous Explorer: You experiment constantly with new AI design tools and methods on real work, share findings with the team, and keep your own practice cutting-edge.
• Empowered Action-Taker: You act with agency, starting with just enough context, improvising around missing inputs, and correcting course through tangible output.
• Craft Exemplar: You model exceptional craft, speed, and taste for peers, treating typography, motion, tone, and interaction detail as fundamental to the product.
• Polymath Oriented: You seamlessly combine interaction and conversation design with a strong working technical knowledge of LLMs and agents, moving comfortably between design, product, and engineering contexts.
• Systems Champion: You design reusable patterns that behave cohesively across complex, multi-agent surfaces rather than thinking only in single screens.
• Empathetic Collaborator: You thrive in high-pressure, agile settings, embracing feedback, prioritizing team standards, and informally mentoring others to lift the collective capability.

Thank you for your interest in a career with Appnovation Technologies! Please note that only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

At Appnovation, we recognize that diverse teams are the strongest teams. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is not only something that we embrace - we celebrate it! We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and we encourage applicants from all backgrounds, lived experiences and industries to apply. Come join us at Appnovation, and learn more about how we stay true to our company values as we build better lives through better digital.

Accommodations are available upon request throughout the recruitment process.