AI Design Lead

Validity•Boston, MA

9d•$170,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Validity is seeking an AI Design Lead to own the comprehensive design vision for Engage, its AI-powered email marketing platform. The role sets direction for how the product looks, feels, and behaves, ensuring a credible, coherent, high-quality experience across customer workflows. It emphasizes exceptional design taste and judgment applied to real B2B needs. The team is AI-native, Claude-native, and code-centric, with prototyping built into its workflow and a move away from Figma. Designers are embedded in squads and own their workflows. The AI Design Lead will bring design judgment to this process and help define what great design looks like on an AI-native team. The product experience extends beyond Validity’s web app to Claude and other assistants, MCP and agent surfaces, and integrations with customers’ existing tools. The role designs the whole Engage experience across surfaces, including those Validity does not fully control. It focuses primarily on the eye—taste and judgment that establish and maintain quality—while technical skills across systems and tools are a bonus. Validity has operated in the email ecosystem for nearly 30 years. Its email data network includes proprietary ISP signals, mailbox-provider partnerships, and more than 2.5 billion behavioral data points processed daily. This foundation powers Validity Engage, an AI email platform for enterprise teams. The company is headquartered in Boston and has offices in Denver, London, Sao Paulo, and Sydney.

Requirements

At least 10 years of experience in product design.
A portfolio demonstrating ownership of a product’s design direction, deep user and workflow understanding, and experience setting a quality bar and leading a team toward it.
Track record designing software for complex B2B workflows involving professional users and multi-step work, where credibility, clarity, and coherence are important.
Experience shaping user experiences on surfaces not fully controlled by the product team, such as integrations, embedded experiences, assistants, or agent-driven interfaces.
Hands-on experience using AI tools in the design process and genuine curiosity about design when AI produces much of the first-draft volume.
Comfort prototyping in code or with AI rather than relying solely on static mockups.
Well-developed design sensibility, exceptional taste, and the judgment to distinguish good from great.
Habit of engaging directly with customers and designing from firsthand understanding rather than only secondhand research summaries.
Experience aligning multiple teams around a coherent product while respecting workflow-specific needs.
Experience building high-trust, iterative relationships with Product and Engineering teams and settling direction early rather than relying on handoffs.
Experience mentoring designers and running regular, candid design critiques.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to articulate design decisions and standards to designers, engineers, and executives.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on technical skills such as front-end coding, design tokens, or design-system work.
Experience designing AI-powered products or agent and assistant experiences, including MCP-based surfaces.
Experience in email marketing, martech, data-heavy products, or CRM products.

Responsibilities

Own the product design vision and direction for the overall Engage product, from customer problem through UX to polished, shipped experience.
Maintain a high standard of design quality, recognize and explain the difference between good and great work, and help the team reach that standard.
Regularly attend and observe customer sessions to understand customer personas and workflows firsthand.
Design the whole product experience across visual and nonvisual surfaces, including experiences beyond the web app.
Define and maintain quality standards for surfaces Validity does not fully control, including integrations, assistants, and agent-rendered experiences.
Partner closely with Product to settle UX and requirements early and collaborate with Engineering through a shared, high-trust process.
Guide teams toward product coherence while recognizing that individual workflows may require different treatments.
Help define how design works on an AI-native, AI-assisted, code-centric team, contributing taste and judgment to the process.
Teach and mentor designers, run a regular high-trust design critique, and foster a candid, safe feedback culture.
Communicate design decisions and standards effectively to designers, engineers, and executives, in writing and conversation.