Lead Product Designer

Authorium•San Francisco, CA

5d•$140,000 - $160,000

About The Position

Authorium is transforming how government agencies manage complex, document-centric workflows. Our platform integrates essential administrative functions — from procurement to contracting to budgeting — into a unified system that drives efficiency, compliance, and visibility for public-sector teams. We serve 500+ government agencies across 40+ states, and we're approaching Series B. Design at Authorium The Product team is small and high-leverage. Today it's the Head of Product, a Senior PM, and a Product Designer — and we're adding a Product Analyst. You'll join as the most senior design hire and the first design leader, reporting to the Head of Product and managing the Product Designer. We work in Figma, manage delivery in Jira, and use Pendo for product analytics. Our design system is established but growing — you'll inherit it and make it better. We ship in two-week sprints and validate with users regularly. Government workflows are complex by nature. Our users manage procurement solicitations, evaluation scoring, contract documents, and compliance reporting — often for the first time on a digital platform. The design challenge isn't making things look good. It's making dense, high-stakes workflows feel navigable for users who didn't choose the tool and can't easily change their process. We're also investing in AuthorAI, trained on millions of government procurement documents, to help users draft, review, and manage documents faster. You'll have a direct hand in shaping how AI shows up in the product experience. The Role This is a founding design leadership role. You'll own UX/UI across the entire Authorium platform — not a single product area, the whole thing. You'll also operate with the ownership and accountability of a product leader: framing problems, driving scope decisions, and carrying initiatives from inception through delivery. You'll build the design function. That means setting the bar for quality, establishing review practices, mentoring the current designer, and laying the groundwork for a team that scales as the company grows. This role sits at the senior level of our Product Design career ladder (Associate Product Designer → Product Designer → Lead Product Designer), a separate track within the Product organization. Who This Role Is For — and Who It Isn't This role is for you if you want to build something, not just execute within something that already exists. You'll shape the design function, own the platform experience, and have a seat at the product strategy table. The work is complex, the scope is wide, and the impact is direct. This role is not for you if you prefer well-defined project briefs, long design cycles, or working within a large design org with established processes. We're building the processes. You'll need to be comfortable with ambiguity, make judgment calls with incomplete information, and move between strategic thinking and production work in the same week. How You'll Work Platform ownership: You think about the product as a system. Consistency, coherence, and usability at scale are your responsibility. Execution through delivery: You don't hand off and walk away. You stay with the work through implementation and hold the bar on what ships. Opinionated collaboration: You bring a point of view to every conversation — and you can defend it, adapt it, or let it go based on what you learn. Team builder: You invest in the people around you and create the conditions for the design function to grow. Calm under complexity: You bring structure and clarity to ambiguous, high-stakes product work without needing everything defined before you start.

Requirements

7+ years of product design experience, with at least 3 years focused on enterprise SaaS or complex B2B applications.
Demonstrated experience owning design end-to-end across a platform — not just individual features or screens.
Track record of operating with PM-level ownership: framing problems, driving scope decisions, and carrying initiatives through delivery.
Deep skill in designing for dense, data-heavy, workflow-driven products — tables, filters, multi-step flows, role-based experiences, and configuration interfaces.
Experience leading user research: planning studies, running usability tests, synthesizing findings, and connecting them to product decisions.
Systems thinking — you see the product as an interconnected whole, not a collection of screens.
Experience managing or mentoring designers, with a point of view on how to build design quality into a team.
Expert-level Figma proficiency: components, libraries, auto-layout, prototyping.
Proficiency in utilizing AI tools to accelerate and improve the design process and artifacts.
Comfortable working in Jira-based agile workflows — sprint planning, backlog management, and cross-functional delivery coordination.
Strong understanding of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) and experience designing for compliance-driven environments.
Clear communication — you can explain design decisions in terms of user outcomes and business tradeoffs, not aesthetics.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing for government, public sector, or regulated industry users.
Experience with product analytics tools (Pendo, Mixpanel, Amplitude, or similar) to inform design decisions with usage data.
Experience working with offshore or distributed engineering teams on front-end implementation quality.
Background in or exposure to product management — formal or informal.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end user experience across the Authorium platform — intake, approvals, document generation, evaluations, configuration, and reporting.
Drive the AI UX strategy, ensuring thoughtful and context-aware integration into complex government workflows to serve users across all levels of AI expertise
Identify and resolve UX debt, inconsistencies, and usability gaps proactively across the full product surface.
Shape and steward the design system: components, patterns, libraries, and standards that scale with the product and accelerate engineering delivery.
Design for accessibility and compliance from the start — our government customers require it, and our users deserve it.
Lead user research efforts: usability testing, user interviews, workflow observation, and synthesis of qualitative findings.
Use Pendo to track feature adoption, user behavior, and engagement patterns — and translate usage data into design priorities.
Develop and maintain journey maps, personas, and workflow models that ground product decisions in real user context.
Bring data-driven reasoning to roadmap and prioritization conversations alongside Product and Engineering.
Take epics and initiatives from problem definition through design, requirements refinement, engineering handoff, and implementation review.
Partner with PMs to frame problems, define scope, and make tradeoff decisions — not as a downstream resource, but as a co-owner of the outcome.
Integrate AI across the design lifecycle, from initial ideation and wireframes through prototyping and usability testing.
Manage design work in Jira: participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and release coordination for design-heavy initiatives.
Review implemented work against design intent and hold the bar on fidelity through delivery.
Partner closely with Engineering leads on feasibility, component architecture, and front-end delivery quality.
Collaborate with Solutions and Client Success to understand deployment context, onboarding challenges, and real-world usage patterns.
Present design direction and rationale to leadership, client stakeholders, and cross-functional partners with clarity and confidence.
Establish design review practices, critique cadence, and quality standards for the design function.
Build the foundation for a scalable design team — processes, documentation, and hiring input as the function grows.
Participate in hiring for future design and product roles.