Lead UX Designer, AI Experiences

Caterpillar Inc.•Peoria, IL

About The Position

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc. When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it. Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc. Cat Digital is the digital and technology arm of Caterpillar Inc., leveraging the latest technologies to build industry leading digital solutions for our customers and dealers. With over 1.5 million connected assets worldwide, our teams use data, technology, advanced analytics, telematics, and AI capabilities to help our customers build a better, more sustainable world. Job Summary: Working closely with product and engineering partners, you will lead the AI experience vision and coordinate cross-functional execution to deliver customer-centric, agentic, chat, voice, and intelligence-embedded experiences across product teams.

Requirements

Creativity Knowledge of creative approaches and techniques for designing innovative AI experiences (agentic, chat, voice, and intelligence embedded into flows). Level – Extensive Experience: Maintains a balance between bold AI innovation and practical constraints, including safety, privacy, and governance guardrails. Challenges conventional GUI‑first patterns; explores conversational, multimodal, and agentic user journeys that combine orchestration, tool use, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Monitors emerging AI UX/UI patterns (e.g., transparency, uncertainty handling) and evaluates applicability to our products. Finds new ways to approach complex AI interaction problems (disambiguation, recovery strategies, fallback modes, and escalation paths).
Decision Making and Critical Thinking Ability to analyze user needs and make informed design decisions for AI experiences. Level – Extensive Experience: Evaluates past AI experience outcomes (e.g., resolution/containment rate, satisfaction, safety incidents) to drive continuous improvement. Advises others on synthesizing qualitative/quantitative signals, weighing alternatives, and making trade-offs. Applies effective, collaborative decision frameworks with Product, Engineering, Data/ML, and Compliance to balance value, risk, and feasibility.
Human‑Centered Design (HCD) Ability to design AI experiences that meet real customer needs and deliver measurable business outcomes. Level – Extensive Experience: Defines objectives, success metrics, and guardrails for AI-mediated tasks; clarifies where automation ends, and human oversight begins. Consults on complex scenarios (regulated content, safety‑critical moments); aligns solutions with enterprise responsible‑AI requirements.
UX/UI Design Ability to design intuitive, effective AI interactions across chat, voice, and multimodal interfaces, as well as intelligence embedded into product flows. Level – Extensive Experience: Advises on mental models for human–AI collaboration (initiative, turn-taking, transparency, and confidence framing), and surveys competitive patterns. Coaches others on evaluating AI UX effectiveness in context (task success, effort reduction, safety gates, error recovery) and interpreting telemetry responsibly. Develops prototypes, user journeys, conversation scripts, and production‑ready design deliverables. Delivers high-quality UI that balances visual excellence, interaction clarity, and AI quality signals (citations, confidence cues, and remedial actions).

Responsibilities

Influence product and business strategy through strong stakeholder partnerships at leadership levels, shaping priorities, roadmaps, and investment decisions.
Lead design workshops and vision work for cross-functional teams. Bringing together business goals, product requirements, industry-leading design standards, user research, and insights.
Serve as the design authority within the pod structure, guiding decisions, resolving trade-offs, and ensuring high-quality outcomes in complex, cross-functional environments.
Participate in UX design intake and work distribution among designers, inclusive of assessing scope, complexity, and required design investment, and considering capacity, skillset, and domain alignment
Contribute to journey mapping, component library governance, and other foundational experience artifacts.
Run design reviews and critiques to evolve and validate proposed design solutions align with vision, requirements, existing architecture, and established design systems.
Develop designer capability through coaching, modeling, and feedback, increasing the maturity, autonomy, and strategic impact of pod designers.
Coordinate across designers to anticipate and identify impacts from upcoming releases or parallel workstreams.
Track QA builds to identify and flag fidelity risks early, partnering with engineering to resolve issues.
Synthesize signals across research, delivery, feedback, and performance metrics to identify emerging risks, opportunities, and strategic shifts.
Contribute to the evolution of UX operating models, systems, and practices that enable scalable, high-quality design delivery.