Founding Product Designer

Salient•San Francisco, CA

2d•$175,000 - $230,000•Onsite

About The Position

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services, automating processes like loan servicing, compliance, and claims for banks and lenders. We are a rapidly growing, profitable company backed by prominent investors, serving a significant portion of the auto lending industry and processing millions of customer interactions daily. We are seeking our first Product Designer to lead the next phase of product development. This hands-on role involves working directly with product, engineering, customers, and leadership to enhance how customers build, manage, monitor, and improve our AI agents. You will have broad ownership, influencing product direction from initial concepts to launch and establishing the design foundation for future growth.

Requirements

5+ years of product design experience
Experience designing AI-powered products, agents, copilots, or human-in-the-loop systems
Experience designing complex B2B, enterprise, operational, or technical products
A portfolio showing work you personally owned from an ambiguous problem through launch
Strong interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and systems thinking
Experience designing monitoring, analytics, evaluation, or exception-management workflows
Experience working directly with customers and using feedback to shape the product
A track record of influencing product decisions rather than only executing requirements
Experience building or significantly improving a design system
Ability to design complete workflows, including permissions, edge cases, errors, and operational states
An understanding of how non-deterministic AI behavior affects trust, control, and product design
Experience partnering closely with engineers through implementation
Comfort using AI-assisted tools to prototype and explore ideas quickly
Strong communication and product judgment
Ability to work independently and create structure in a fast-moving environment

Responsibilities

Own product design from customer research and early concepts through launch and iteration
Design how customers configure, test, launch, monitor, and improve AI agents
Build workflows for conversation review, quality assurance, approvals, escalations, and human intervention
Improve how our agents communicate across voice, text, chat, and email
Make agent performance, behavior, and outcomes clear to customers
Simplify complex, data-heavy servicing workflows
Work directly with customers to understand their needs and test new ideas
Partner closely with product and engineering to shape priorities and ship quickly
Build Salient’s design system and shared product patterns
Create a consistent experience across our five live agents and future products
Use Figma, rapid prototypes, and AI tools to test ideas quickly
Help define how the design function grows over time