Director, Product Design (AI Experience)

AlphaSense•New York, NY

2d•$224,000 - $308,000•Hybrid

About The Position

AlphaSense is seeking a design leader to own the user experience of its AI-native, agentic product. The company is transitioning from a research library to an end-to-end workflow platform, aiming to become a "super analyst" with agentic capabilities. This role involves setting the design vision for the AI experience, leading a small team of senior designers, and collaborating with Product and Engineering to create a coherent, high-quality, and trustworthy product. This is a player-coach role, requiring both leadership and hands-on design work. The quality of the user experience is seen as a core driver of the company's success, especially as they build an AI-native platform. The successful candidate will be responsible for setting the UX direction for the core AI/agentic experience, defining a clear vision and a path to achieve it. They will partner with senior product leadership, advocate for the best user experience, and solve complex UX challenges related to data density, information overload, trust and transparency in AI workflows, and overall product cohesion. The role also involves staying hands-on with prototyping, contributing to key product surfaces, and raising the bar for AI-native design across the product. Additionally, the role includes contributing to the design system, coaching and growing a team of senior designers, and multiplying the team's impact through operating mechanisms. Persuasive communication with senior leadership, grounded in customer evidence and business outcomes, is also a key aspect of the position.

Requirements

A senior product-design leader with 10+ years of relevant design experience at technical and product-driven companies (3+ years in people management preferred), and a track record of owning a major product area’s experience and shipping it, ideally in complex, data-dense, or expert-user domains.
Strong, well-argued opinions held with humility: you shape direction and create healthy friction, and you update your view when the evidence changes.
Genuine AI-native product judgment: not just content generation, but designing for trust, control, and workflow transformation in agentic and probabilistic systems.
Hands-on craft and technical fluency: comfortable prototyping in code (React / modern front-end an advantage) and using AI tools in your workflow; credible to designers and engineers alike.
People leadership: evidence you can model, coach, and care for a team, not only align stakeholders. (For candidates newer to formal management, we’ll look for strong player-coach signals and a real motivation to develop others.)
Excellent communication and collaboration with both technical and non-technical partners, and comfort operating in ambiguity across teams.
Curiosity about (or experience in) financial services, fintech, or other high-stakes professional domains. Domain expertise is a strong plus; a serious, humble approach to ramping into it is essential.

Nice To Haves

React / modern front-end an advantage
Domain expertise in financial services, fintech, or other high-stakes professional domains is a strong plus

Responsibilities

Set the UX direction for the core AI / agentic experience: a clear, opinionated vision for how analysts work with AI on high-stakes financial decisions, and a sequenced path from today’s product to that north star.
Lead through influence and craft: partner with an SVP of Product and multiple PMs (across NY and the UK), advocating for the best experience while working through business goals, timelines, and technical constraints to decide the real first step.
Solve the hard, data-dense UX problems: malleable UI with sensible defaults for hedge funds and banks (without overwhelming them), taming information overload, trust and transparency in AI-mediated workflows (citations, confidence, control, reversibility), and cohesion across surfaces.
Stay hands-on: prototype in code and with real data, contribute directly to the highest-leverage surfaces, and set the craft bar by doing the work, not just reviewing it.
Raise the bar for AI-native design: define how AI shows up as a first-party capability across the product, not just in one agentic pane.
Help evolve our foundations: contribute to a design system being rebuilt to be code- and AI-readable.
Coach, grow, and care for a small team of senior designers: modeling the craft, giving sharp feedback, and creating the conditions for them to own outcomes end-to-end.
Hire and level thoughtfully as the team grows, keeping the org flat and the talent bar high.
Multiply the team’s impact through operating mechanisms (UX audits, opportunity maps, product narratives, design reviews, and clear quality bars) rather than personal output alone.
Communicate persuasively upward, including to VP/C-level, grounding proposals in customer evidence and business outcomes.