Product Designer (UI/UX)

AJAIA•New York, NY

20h•Onsite

About The Position

Ajaia is seeking a Product Designer (UI/UX) to lead discovery and design initiatives for both client projects and Ajaia's internal product suite. This role involves direct interaction with end-users to understand their workflows, identify gaps, and translate these insights into actionable designs, including user journeys, wireframes, and prototypes. The designer will be responsible for user testing designs before development and maintaining Ajaia's design standards. This is a hands-on position requiring the individual to perform both research and design tasks.

Requirements

Runs discovery yourself: interviews, usability testing, and reading behavioral data.
Moves from synthesis to a working prototype fast.
Designs the human checkpoints into a workflow rather than bolting them on later.
Comfortable holding a room when the evidence points somewhere a stakeholder does not expect.
AI fluent: uses AI daily to research, synthesize, and prototype, and can tell good output from slop.
Comfortable working directly alongside engineers through build.
No minimum years required. We hire on the work.
On-site in New York, with client-site travel for discovery work.

Nice To Haves

A public portfolio or case studies we can look at before we meet.
Experience designing AI-native workflows, including where a human checkpoint belongs.
Consulting, agency, or professional services experience with concurrent clients.
Comfort with lightweight front-end implementation.

Responsibilities

Run discovery on client engagements: interview the people doing the work, watch them do it, and find the gap between what they say and what they actually do.
Talk to users of Ajaia's own products the same way.
Synthesize findings into what people actually need, stated separately from what they asked for, with the evidence for each.
Design the solution: user journeys, wireframes, and prototypes that an engineer can build from without guessing.
Decide where a human has to sign off inside a workflow, and design that checkpoint into the product rather than bolting it on afterward.
Test designs with real users before code exists, not after.
Push back on a stakeholder's feature list when the evidence points somewhere else, and explain why in terms they can act on.
Own the design standard across Ajaia's product suite so a designer joining engagement three does not have to reinvent decisions made on engagement one.
Prototype with AI tools as a default, not a novelty.
Know when the AI-native path saves real time and when it produces something you have to rebuild by hand anyway.
Hand off design work in a state an engineer can actually start from, and stay involved enough during the build to catch it when implementation drifts from the intent.