Senior Lead Product Designer

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence•Seattle, WA

5d•Onsite

About The Position

Ai2 is looking for a Senior Lead Product Designer to build intuitive, elegant, and impactful user experiences across our growing portfolio of AI products and our website. In this role, you will transform complex AI concepts into visually compelling and intuitive experiences. You will work closely with research and engineering to drive high-impact projects that shape the future of AI products and user interactions. This is a highly visible role for a bold, visionary designer with a strong visual design sense and deep UX expertise — someone who can drive product design end to end, from framing user problems to delivering high-quality solutions that influence product direction. If you thrive in a fast-paced environment and can balance strategic vision with hands-on execution, we'd love to hear from you. The projects you’ll be working on are highly complex, on the bleeding edge of AI, and often have no precedent from which to borrow design patterns, so we’ll be looking for someone with a demonstrated ability to think creatively and distill complicated research ideas into clear and intuitive user experiences from scratch. At Ai2, our design team shapes how people experience, understand, and interact with AI. From exploring open models in the Ai2 Playground to defining new interaction patterns for AI agents and the OlmoEarth platform. We’re a small, collaborative team that works closely with researchers, engineers, and program managers to turn complex AI systems into meaningful user experiences. We value curiosity, collaboration, and a shared commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI-driven design and technology.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in UX, product, or interaction design for complex digital products.
A strong portfolio demonstrating modern, user-centered design with measurable product impact.
Expertise in end-to-end product design, from problem framing through polished UI execution.
Proficiency in Figma and familiarity with research and prototyping tools.
Proficiency with AI tools for rapid prototyping and iteration
Solid understanding of user-centered design, accessibility, and responsive design best practices.
Demonstrated ability to simplify complex systems, preferably in technical or AI-driven products.
Exceptional communication skills and ability to articulate design rationale to diverse audiences.
Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-paced environments.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing for developer tools, AI interfaces, or data-heavy applications.
Familiarity with A/B testing, user analytics, or quantitative validation methods.
Understanding of business metrics and how design drives adoption and engagement.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end design process for complex, multi-surface AI products, from user research and information architecture to interaction design, prototypes, and visual polish.
Translate complex technical and research concepts into simple, discoverable, and intuitive user experiences.
Design interaction flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity mockups using modern tools like Figma.
Spearhead efforts to evaluate AI-based design tools to standardize and improve design workflows.
Partner with PMs, engineers, and researchers to align product strategy, user needs, and technical feasibility.
Work cross-functionally and nimbly to ensure consistent UX across products, demos, and research.
Expand Ai2’s UX design system, patterns, and components that enable fast iteration and consistent experiences.
Define and evangelize scalable design frameworks that connect visual and interaction design to Ai2’s broader mission.
Contribute to and evolve a unified design language across projects.
Drive design alignment across teams, clarifying priorities and ensuring design quality scales with impact.
Partner with leadership to shape the long-term user experience strategy for Ai2’s open models and tools.
Communicate design rationale and trade-offs effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams to define mechanisms that improve design collaboration, velocity, and quality.
Think creatively to invent and execute innovative solutions that present our research in ways that accelerate and expand impact.