Lead Product Designer, AI for the Planet
About The Position
We are a small product team at the Allen Institute for AI working on AI for the Planet. We're working on maritime conservation, food security, disaster resilience, and climate solutions with some of the most impactful organizations on the planet. Design, engineering, product, and partnerships work side by side with an ML research team, building products that support our environmental and high-impact users. Today, our team works on two products: Skylight provides AI-powered intelligence to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing to protect our oceans. Governments, enforcement agencies, and conservation organizations in 95+ countries use Skylight data to protect their waters today via our interface, API, and most recently an agentic interface named Shippy. Read more at https://allenai.org/skylight. OlmoEarth is an open platform built around our family of foundation models for Earth observation. Users create custom fine-tuned models to detect and classify novel geospatial features. The platform handles the full loop: imagery acquisition, annotation, as well as model training and inference for ML and non-ML experts alike. Partners today include International Food Policy Research Institute, The Group on Earth Observation, NASA Harvest, Global Mangrove Watch, Amazon Conservation Alliance and more across for-good domains. Read more at https://allenai.org/olmoearth. You'll own the design for these products, and you'll have designers around you. Ai2's design group spans the organization, with designers working on open models, scientific agents, and our other conservation platforms. We lean on each other for critique, shared systems, and solving hard interaction problems. It's a small group, so the patterns you set here influence other teams and products. If you're the kind of designer who is excited by how fast the craft is changing and wants your work to support for-good efforts in agriculture, ocean conservation, forests, and the climate, this is for you.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional product design experience in industry, focused on web applications and software products.
- Experience working side by side with product and engineering teams and shipping real products to real users.
- Bachelor's degree.
- Deep command of usability, user research, interaction design, information architecture, visual design, and design systems.
- Ability to articulate why a design works.
- Experience designing data-intensive applications (dense tables, charts, filtering and query interfaces, dashboards, monitoring and alerting, or analysis tools).
- A track record of taking products end to end: framing the problem, running user research, exploring options, driving to a decision, seeing it shipped to external users, and continuing to refine it based on how people actually use it.
- Experience using modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code, agentic workflows) to move faster and rethink how design gets done.
- Ability to build the design foundation for the team (systems, patterns, components, and tooling).
- Ability to bring in new ideas and techniques.
- Ability to look for ways to strengthen the whole team’s craft.
- Ability to learn new domains fast, including ML concepts.
- A portfolio demonstrating at least one software interface design project, submitted with your application.
Nice To Haves
- Experience at small or growth-stage companies, where you own outcomes end to end without heavy process scaffolding.
- Experience designing for varying user groups: non-technical people acting on AI output, non-English speakers, or users on low-bandwidth connections.
- Experience with geospatial interfaces: maps, layers, time sliders, spatial querying.
- A demonstrated track record of building and self-directed learning (e.g., side projects, open-source contributions, writing, or talks).
- Awareness of how software interfaces get built.
- Familiarity with HTML, CSS, and TypeScript.
Responsibilities
- Own the design for Skylight and OlmoEarth products.
- Set design patterns that influence other teams and products.
- Design for the entire loop of automated model development, including managing and inspecting datasets, making sense of complex model configurations, reading evaluation results, and deciding what to change on the next iteration.
- Design multi-tenant agents, including what a software product looks like when you stop clicking through it and start asking it questions.
- Design how agents live inside a rich, interactive platform.
- Build trust with users regarding model performance and transparency.
- Make concepts like training runs and evaluation metrics meaningful to non-experts.
- Collaborate closely with engineers and understand what's possible in software interface development.
- Travel occasionally to meet directly with users.
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Employee assistance program
- Health savings account plan
- Healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan
- Health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans
- 401k plan
- $125 per month for commuting or internet expenses
- $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses
- Up to ten sick days per year
- Up to seven personal days per year
- Up to 20 vacation days per year
- Twelve paid holidays throughout the calendar year
- Annual bonuses
- Long-term incentive plan
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
