Lead Product Designer

TinyFish•Palo Alto, CA

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

TinyFish operates on a fundamental principle: work with the world as it is, make the hard parts feel easy, and give people the space to do what they do best. We're seeking a Lead Product Designer who embodies this philosophy while pioneering the intersection of human-centered design and artificial intelligence. This role isn't about following established playbooks—it's about writing them. You'll architect product experiences that leverage LLMs not as mere features, but as fundamental design materials that reshape how humans interact with technology.

Requirements

Deep LLM Knowledge: Understanding of transformer architectures, prompt engineering, RAG systems, and emerging patterns like chain-of-thought reasoning and constitutional AI
AI Product Experience: Shipped products leveraging GPT-4, Claude, or similar models; understanding of their capabilities, limitations, and optimal use cases
Systems Thinking: Ability to design for emergent behaviors, feedback loops, and non-linear user journeys inherent in AI systems
0→1 Track Record: Multiple examples of creating successful products in undefined categories where you had to invent the interaction paradigms
Craft Excellence: Pixel-perfect attention to detail while maintaining velocity; ability to produce high-fidelity prototypes that feel production-ready
Research Integration: Experience conducting foundational research in unexplored problem spaces and translating insights into breakthrough designs
Intellectual Rigor: Ability to engage with complex technical concepts and translate them into human-comprehensible experiences
First-Principles Thinking: Comfort challenging assumptions and reimagining interactions from fundamental human needs rather than existing patterns
Communication Precision: Capability to articulate design decisions through multiple lenses—technical feasibility, user value, and business impact

Nice To Haves

You've designed products where the AI isn't just a feature but fundamentally changes the product's architecture
You understand concepts like attention mechanisms, embedding spaces, and temperature settings well enough to design around them
You've wrestled with designing for stochastic outputs and found elegant solutions
You've developed novel interaction patterns that make complex AI capabilities feel simple and delightful

Responsibilities

Conceptualize and design entirely new product categories that don't yet have mental models or design patterns
Transform ambiguous problem spaces into elegant, intuitive experiences that feel inevitable in hindsight
Build design systems that scale from first prototype to product-market fit without fundamental restructuring
Design interaction paradigms that treat LLMs as collaborative partners rather than command-response tools
Architect probabilistic UI systems that gracefully handle the non-deterministic nature of AI outputs
Create design patterns for managing context windows, token efficiency, and latency as first-class UX considerations
Develop frameworks for designing around hallucination, uncertainty, and model limitations without breaking user trust
Partner with engineering and product to influence model fine-tuning based on UX requirements
Design feedback loops that simultaneously improve user experience and model performance
Create evaluation frameworks for AI-powered features that balance capability with comprehensibility
Establish design principles for ethical AI deployment that maintain user agency while leveraging automation
Mentor designers in developing AI literacy without requiring ML engineering knowledge
Establish design critique processes that evaluate both traditional usability and AI-specific interaction patterns
Build cross-functional bridges between design, ML engineering, and product to create unified experiences