Product Design Lead, AI Platform

Urban Ridge Supplies•New York, NY

2h•$147,900 - $325,000

About The Position

The Product Design Lead is a leadership-level individual contributor on Rippling’s AI Platform team. The role defines how AI appears across Rippling’s product suite and shapes the patterns, systems, and interaction models that make enterprise AI useful, reliable, and integrated into work. The designer works across multiple product verticals, partnering with product, engineering, and executive leaders to turn emerging AI capabilities into coherent, scalable product experiences. This position combines strategic leadership with hands-on design work. It involves shaping an approach to enterprise AI while working through interaction and graphic design, technical constraints, model behavior, workflows, permissions, and edge cases. The designer leads ambiguous, high-impact, cross-product initiatives; creates reusable AI design frameworks and patterns; prototypes and documents concepts; and supports other designers through coaching, reviews, and scalable guidance. The AI Platform team builds foundations for AI-native products across Rippling, collaborating with teams in HR, IT, Finance, Spend, Travel, Payroll, Benefits, and other areas. The role is a key design partner to senior product and engineering leaders and helps connect individual AI efforts into a coherent, trustworthy product language. Rippling values in-office work for office-based employees, who are expected under current policy to work in the office at least three days per week.

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, with fluency in modern AI product development language, trade-offs, and constraints.
Exceptional systems thinking and the ability to 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 individual contributor, principal designer, design director, or equivalent design leader.
Deep interaction design craft, including the ability to create and validate novel patterns through prototypes or production work.
Strong product judgment and strategic thinking, including the ability to frame ambiguous problems, identify high-leverage opportunities, and influence roadmaps across teams.
Excellent executive communication, storytelling, writing, and documentation skills.
Technical curiosity and fluency, including comfort working with engineers on AI systems, platform primitives, model behavior, evaluations, agentic workflows, MCPs, or related 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, go-to-market, and customer-facing teams, constructively challenging assumptions and raising standards.
A strong point of view on how AI should improve enterprise software, combined with willingness to learn from customers, data, technical constraints, and implementation teams.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the design vision for AI Platform experiences across Rippling, including product concepts, interaction patterns, and principles for AI-native workflows.
Create 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 involving product, engineering, data, infrastructure, design, and go-to-market teams.
Partner with AI Platform product managers, engineering managers, product engineers, and design leaders to translate technical capabilities into intuitive, trustworthy user experiences.
Work hands-on with product pods while connecting patterns across the AI Platform roadmap and adjacent product areas.
Translate AI behaviors, model capabilities, evaluations, agentic workflows, and platform constraints into practical product patterns for teams to adopt.
Create high-fidelity prototypes, frameworks, written narratives, and decision-making artifacts to align executives, de-risk strategic bets, and help teams move quickly.
Coach designers, review work, and codify scalable guidance to raise the craft bar for AI product experiences.
Stay informed by customers, customer-facing teams, competitors, and frontier AI developments to identify needs and inform long-term AI product strategy.
Shape enterprise AI experiences around real business workflows, sensitive data, approvals, accountability, and measurable customer value.