Director, Product Design

Replicant

1d • Remote

About The Position

At Replicant, we believe AI should work for people, starting with customer service. That's why we built a platform that helps contact centers resolve more requests, proactively identify issues, and improve agent performance with AI-powered conversation intelligence and AI agents that act like your best reps.
Our AI agents handle millions of calls every month for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth innovators. From processing payments to booking appointments and authenticating users, they help customers get what they need instantly, 24/7. Meanwhile, our real-time conversation insights help contact center leaders coach better and improve every interaction.
We're leading the shift from legacy systems to AI-first service, powered by large language models (LLMs) and designed for enterprise scale, security, and empathy. If you're excited by the potential of LLMs, voice AI, and building category-defining technology with a kind, ambitious team, you'll love it here.
About the role
This role reports to the VP of Product, owns the practice outright, and comes with two designers attached – our Conversation Design Lead and a Lead / Principal Product Designer whose role you’ll define and hire.
Roughly 80% of your time goes into the work itself, and we mean owning high-leverage product design decisions rather than delivering via management of a team. You’ll be accountable for product design decisions and direction across every surface — the sales conversation, the deployments our delivery team configures, the AI agent talking to a customer, the analytics an operator reads every morning.
The other 20% is designing and running the product design practice to increase design’s leverage across the organization. We’re looking to you to help us get design right – we’ve tried to build design here twice and we’ve under-resourced it both times. Our org has grown up as sales- and engineering-led, and in this role you’ll shepherd how we grow and mature through product and design leadership. As the design practice grows into a pillar of our product function, this role grows with it.
If you want a green field to help demonstrate how powerful a force product design can be – and you want to do that while applying cutting-edge HCI to age-old problems of providing better customer service – this is the role for you.

Requirements

• You think in systems and journeys. Before asking which control a step needs, you ask whether the step needs to exist. You've designed across touchpoints that weren't all interfaces: a call, a handoff, an email, a conversation with a human agent.
• You have a real HCI or interaction-design foundation. You can reason from first principles about how people perceive, learn, form expectations, and recover from error, rather than from patterns you've seen in other products. Voice, conversational, and graphical interfaces all sit inside our product, and we need someone who can move between them without starting over each time.
• You've driven change through resistance. You've moved an entrenched team over months, not just changed one executive's mind in one meeting. You can describe what you were up against and what it took.
• You lead with the human and you integrate business outcomes and thinking without being asked. You've spent time close to the PM role, or worked with product closely enough that you think that way anyway. You can point to specific decisions that changed because of a conversation you personally had with a customer.
• You've governed a design system, not only built one. Contribution, documentation, deprecation, and the arguments that come with them. You can describe a time you told someone no and why. The governance matters more to us than how many components you drew.
• You find the problems and set your own priorities. You identify opportunities the team hadn't seen and make the case for them. You converge without being pushed and escalate the right things at the right time.
• You're AI-native in your practice. You use these tools in real design work and have earned opinions about where they help and where they degrade quality. You've built workflows or assets other people adopted.
• You lead people and hold a room. Setting direction, giving hard feedback, running a critique, growing someone's craft, and hiring. You can also hold your position in front of executives and customers. Formal management experience helps; evidence that designers got better working with you matters more than a title.
• Based in a US or Canadian timezone
• 10+ years of product design experience, including 2-3+ at the director or principal level
• Experience leading or growing designers, whether or not you had the title
• Experience owning design for an enterprise or operational product
• We care about the scope of what you've owned, not years on a résumé. If you're unsure whether you're at this level, apply anyway. We'd rather assess it than have you self-select out.

Nice To Haves

• Figma fluency on the system side: components, variants, libraries, variables, tokens. Enough to hold your hire to a standard and to work in the files yourself.
• Comfort moving between Figma and code (Storybook, shadcn/ui, Tailwind, or tools like Cursor and Claude Code). If you want to pick up UI-level changes yourself, that's open to you with preview environments and engineering review.
• Experience designing AI or conversational products, especially where the output was non-deterministic and you had to design failure states, trust, correction, and recovery.
• Experience with operational or contact center tooling.
• Experience defining a design practice from close to nothing.
• Experience leading designers across more than one discipline — product, conversation, content, or research.

Responsibilities

• Own the whole customer experience, interface included. A customer's experience of Replicant runs from the sales conversation, through a deployment our delivery team configures, into an AI agent that talks to their customers, and back out through the analytics their operators read daily.
• Set the information architecture for a converging platform. Our conversation intelligence and agent-building products grew separately and are now becoming one product. You decide what the objects are, what they're called, and how someone moves between them.
• Own the design system's architecture and the rules around it. The foundation exists — components in Figma and in Storybook. What's missing is a pattern language, documented decisions about when to use what, and a contribution model engineers can build against. You set that architecture, govern it, and are accountable for it existing.
• Extend design's influence past the work you do yourself. Much of the customer-facing experience here gets shaped by people outside your team: product managers, delivery engineers who configure agents, solutions engineers in demos. Raising the bar means influencing them, giving them something good enough to follow, and telling them no when it matters.
• Drive rapid prototype-and-validation loops. You'll talk to internal customers, contact center operators and turn what you hear into design decisions, owning method as well as findings. You’ll create and drive a best-in-class prototype-and-validate loop.
• Bring product design and conversation design together. Our product is a conversation, so we've put both disciplines in one practice. You own how they come together and the research practice underneath both.

Benefits

• In-person connection that counts: company-wide offsites and smaller team gatherings designed to make remote work feel personal
• Tech & learning stipend: Conferences, books, courses — interested? We’ll fund them
• Remote by design: We’re distributed — no guilt about life events, we trust you to manage your calendar
• Health & wellness: Flexible vacations, paid sabbatical after 5 years, comprehensive benefits, plus a stipend to support your physical and mental well-being
• Compensation that matches your impact: competitive salaries in the company you’re helping to build
• Equity with upside: We believe in shared ownership—You’ll own a real piece of a fast-growing AI company

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed