Slack VP, Product Design (Individual Contributor; Principal Architect)

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Slack is reimagining work as an AI operating system where humans and agents collaborate to drive outcomes. As Slack VP, Product Design (IC; Principal Architect), you will shape the platform, own the design craft at the highest level, and personally execute on the next generation of Slack.

You will report to the SVP & Chief Design Officer and partner with product and engineering leadership to prototype, pressure-test, and scale the vision across surfaces and devices for millions of users.

Qualifications

• Senior design leader with hands-on craft and prototyping ability.
• Ability to inspire and influence across org without formal authority.
• Experience shaping AI-enabled product experiences with enterprise impact.

Responsibilities

• Define and prototype long-range design vision for Slack's agentic future.
• Lead execution at the highest level with pixel-perfect craft.
• Influence product strategy with C-suite leaders and engineering partners.
• Drive cross-functional alignment across product, engineering, research, and brand.

Job description

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

Job Category

User Experience

Job Details

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn’t a buzzword — it’s a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all.

Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You’re in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce.

About Slack & The Role

Slack is at an inflection point. We're evolving from the world's most beloved team communication tool into something fundamentally new: an AI operating system where humans and agents work together to get things done. This isn't incremental improvement. It's a reimagining of how work happens.
As Slack VP, Product Design (Individual Contributor; Principal Architect) you will be one of the most important design voices shaping that future. This is not a management role. It's a rare seat at the table for a designer who wants to define the product; to hold the vision, drive the craft, and personally execute at the highest level on the next generation of Slack.
You will report to the SVP & Chief Design Officer and partner deeply with product and engineering leadership to prototype, pressure-test, and shape the platform Slack must become. You'll make work that millions of people use every day and you'll help us make the hardest design problems look inevitable in hindsight.

The Opportunity: Designing Slack as the AI Operating System for Action

Slack's defining role in this next era is as the context layer for work: the intelligent interface where humans and AI agents collaborate fluidly to drive outcomes. Built on context, Slack becomes the single, personalized command center that replaces fragmented apps, inboxes, and point solutions.
As Slack VP, Product Design (Individual Contributor; Principal Architect) you will be the designer helping us answer the hardest questions at the frontier of this transformation:

• Human-Agent Collaboration: What are the right interaction models for a world where AI agents are co-workers? How do agents present information, take action, and hand back control in ways that feel natural, not jarring?
• Radical Simplification: How do we strip Slack down to its most essential, powerful form while making it capable of far more? How do we absorb complexity so users never have to feel it?
• Dynamic & Ambient Interfaces: How do we design surfaces that appear when and where decisions need to be made (across voice, mobile, wearables, and desktop) rather than requiring users to navigate to them?
• The AI Operating System: What does it look like when Slack becomes the single pane of glass for every kind of worker: the CEO, the service agent, the developer, the sales rep? How do we make that feel personal and not overwhelming?

Key Responsibilities

• Vision & Concept Design: Define and prototype the long-range design vision for Slack's agentic future, producing the seminal concepts and vignettes that align the organization and inspire the roadmap
• Executional Craft: Personal, hands-on design at the highest level, pixel-perfect, conceptually sharp, deeply considered. Uses whatever tools work best (AI, code, and emerging prototyping techniques) to turn ideas into working experiences fast, explore possibilities, and raise the bar. The bar you set becomes the bar for the team.
• Strategic Design Influence: Partner with the CDO, CPO, and Engineering leadership to shape product strategy through design. Influence decisions at the SVP and C-level through the power of your work and your thinking
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Drive alignment across product, engineering, research, and brand through the quality and clarity of your design work, without needing formal authority
• Simplification as a Design Discipline: Lead the work to radically simplify Slack's current experience, defining what we kill, what we keep, and what we transform as we move toward an AI-first paradigm
• Emerging Interaction Patterns: Invent new design patterns for agentic UX, for voice-anchored experiences, ambient AI surfaces, multiplayer human-agent co-creation, and dynamic UI generation
• User Advocacy at Scale: Be a relentless champion for the user, particularly the enterprise user under pressure; the worker with 500 unread messages, zero configuration tolerance, and no time to learn a new paradigm