Senior Product Designer

Protolabs • Maple Plain, MN

18h • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Product Designer at Protolabs, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping seamless, intuitive, and scalable digital experiences that help innovators bring products to life. You’ll lead the design of customer‑focused solutions across web, mobile, and emerging platforms—translating insights into polished prototypes, thoughtful interactions, and cohesive end‑to‑end journeys.

In this role, you’ll collaborate closely with product, engineering, and research partners to explore new ideas, iterate quickly, and deliver high‑impact work that drives both user satisfaction and business value. If you thrive in an environment where you can influence strategy, elevate design quality, and bring bold concepts to market, we’d love to meet you.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree (or international equivalent) Interaction Design, Product Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of relevant experience
• Interaction design depth and understanding how people navigate complex systems, not just how to make screens look good.
• Research methods, planning and running of moderated tests, interviews, co-design sessions and concept evaluations.
• Systems thinking; designing for patterns, not for pages.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Continuous learning mindset, always eager to acquire new knowledge and skills
• Ability to balance competing priorities and allocate resources effectively
• Comfort working iteratively in continuous delivery environments
• Figma (UX team uses Figma as its main tool, knowledge should be fluent, not learning)
• Prototyping tools: Figma, Cursor, or equivalent for interaction validation
• Familiarity with design handoff and developer collaboration workflows

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing for B2B platforms
• Familiarity with data-heavy, configuration-driven, or multi-step transactional flows
• Ability to connect UX research findings to product strategy, not just design iteration
• Background in service design or journey mapping at a systems level, across more than one product team
• Familiarity with AI-assisted design tooling (Figma AI, v0, or similar) and a clear-eyed view of what it changes about the design process and what it doesn't
• Exposure to design operations: how teams track decisions, maintain documentation, and scale consistent quality without centralizing every decision

Responsibilities

• Lead generative and evaluative research: user interviews, usability testing, contextual inquiry, concept testing to identify unmet customer needs and validate direction before investment
• Synthesize research into clear insights; frame and shape problems with the Technical Product Manager before solutions are explored, not after
• Build working knowledge of core personas (engineers, procurement buyers, operations managers, suppliers) and use it to ground design decisions in observed behavior, not assumptions
• Design coherent experiences across complex, multi-step workflows: quoting, configuration, ordering, order tracking, supplier interactions
• Produce the right artifacts at the right fidelity: journey maps, service blueprints, flows, wireframes, interactive prototypes, final specs
• Apply accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1 AA) as a baseline expectation, not a post-launch retrofit
• Actively contribute to and evolve the design system. Use shared patterns, strengthen them through new work, and flag gaps or inconsistencies
• Partner with the Design System team to review component implementation; close the gap between design intent and shipped experience
• Document design decisions and component behavior clearly enough for engineers to implement without ambiguity
• Facilitate design reviews, critique sessions, and design sprints that generate real alignment, not performance of process
• Represent design quality and user needs in cross-functional forums with confidence and evidence
• Mentor mid-level and junior designers through critique, co-working sessions, and honest feedback
• Raise design quality through proactive process improvements, shared design principles, and documentation that outlasts the project
• Stay ahead of how AI-assisted design tools are changing the practice; bring a point of view, not just awareness

Benefits

• We offer a competitive total compensation package
• In addition, we offer competitive benefits including but not limited to:
• Health Insurance: Traditional OR High Deductible plan
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Health Savings Account (including employer contributions)
• Dental and Vision
• Basic and Supplemental Life Insurance
• Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
• Paid caregiver leave
• You will receive PTO + Holiday Pay + Wellness Hours + Volunteer Hours
• 401k with company match and immediate vest
• Employee Stock Purchase Program with a 15% discount
• And More!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level