Product Design Lead, AI Platform

Rippling•Seattle, WA

3d•$174,000 - $325,000•Onsite

About The Position

Design is at the center of how Rippling turns complex business software into products people can understand, trust, and use. As a Lead Product Designer on the AI Platform team, you will help define how AI shows up across Rippling’s product suite and shape the patterns, systems, and interaction models that make enterprise AI useful, reliable, and deeply integrated into work. This is a leadership-level individual contributor role for a designer who can operate across ambiguous, high-leverage problem spaces. You will work across multiple product verticals, partnering closely with product, engineering, and executive leadership, aligning others to critical outcomes while helping to translate emerging AI capabilities into coherent product experiences that scale across Rippling. The work is highly visible and strategically important: you will influence not just individual features, but the future of enterprise human-agent interaction. The right person for this role is both strategic and hands-on. You should be able to shape the narrative for how enterprise AI should work, while also getting deep into the details of interaction and graphic design, technical constraints, model behavior, workflows, permissions, and edge cases. In short: you should care about the interface, but understand that the hard part is often the plumbing behind it. If you are a design leader with a renewed interest in building AI things with AI tools, we want to talk to you.

Requirements

At least 10 years of product design experience, including significant experience designing and shipping complex SaaS, platform, or enterprise products.
Recent hands-on experience designing and shipping AI products or AI-powered features; you should be fluent in the language, trade-offs, and constraints of modern AI product development.
Exceptional systems thinking, with the ability to understand and design across complex product architectures, data flows, permissions, dependencies, and edge cases.
A track record of leading high-impact, cross-product initiatives as a senior IC, principal designer, design director, or equivalent design leader.
Deep interaction design craft, including the ability to create novel patterns where established conventions do not yet exist and to prove those patterns through prototypes or production work.
Strong product judgment and strategic thinking, with the ability to frame ambiguous problems, identify high-leverage opportunities, and influence roadmaps across multiple teams.
Excellent executive communication, storytelling, writing, and documentation skills; you should be able to make complex ideas crisp, persuasive, and actionable for senior leaders and cross-functional teams.
Technical curiosity and fluency, including comfort working closely with engineers on AI systems, platform primitives, model behavior, evals, agentic workflows, MCPs, or related technical concepts.
A bias toward shipping, learning, and iterating quickly without sacrificing quality, coherence, or user trust.
A collaborative leadership style that builds trust across design, product, engineering, GTM, and customer-facing teams, while constructively challenging assumptions and raising the bar.
A strong point of view on how AI should improve enterprise software, paired with the humility to learn from customers, data, technical constraints, and the teams closest to implementation.

Nice To Haves

If you don't meet every requirement but are excited about the role, we encourage you to apply. Skills transfer in unexpected ways, and diverse perspectives often lead to the most innovative solutions.
Even if you don’t meet all of the requirements listed here, we still encourage you to apply. Skills can be used in lots of different ways, and your life and professional experience may be relevant beyond what a list of requirements will capture.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the design vision for AI Platform experiences across Rippling, shaping the product concepts, interaction patterns, and principles that teams use to build AI-native workflows.
Help establish “how Rippling does AI” by creating reusable frameworks for AI interactions, agentic workflows, automation, human-in-the-loop review, transparency, trust, permissions, and control.
Lead large, ambiguous, cross-product design initiatives with many dependencies across product, engineering, data, infrastructure, design, and go-to-market teams.
Partner deeply with AI Platform PMs, engineering managers, product engineers, and design leaders to turn complex technical capabilities into intuitive, trustworthy user experiences.
Work hands-on with individual pods while also connecting patterns across the broader AI Platform roadmap and adjacent product areas.
Translate emerging AI behaviors, model capabilities, evaluations, agentic workflows, and platform constraints into practical product patterns that can be adopted across teams.
Create high-fidelity prototypes, frameworks, written narratives, and decision-making artifacts that align executives, de-risk strategic bets, and help teams move quickly.
Raise the craft bar for AI product experiences across Rippling by coaching designers, reviewing work, and codifying patterns into scalable guidance.
Stay close to customers, customer-facing teams, competitors, and frontier AI developments to identify unmet needs and inform Rippling’s long-term AI product strategy.
Help shape how enterprise AI looks beyond demos: grounded in real business workflows, sensitive data, approvals, accountability, and measurable customer value.