Head of Product Design (R5776)

User Research & Product Discovery

• Lead customer research efforts across product development, customer engagement, and solutions teams to identify pain points, workflows, unmet needs, and product opportunities.
• Establish scalable mechanisms for gathering, synthesizing, and communicating user insights throughout the product development lifecycle.
• Translate customer and operational feedback into actionable product recommendations, requirements, and design initiatives.

Product Design & User Experience

• Design end-to-end workflows across autonomy development, simulation, testing, analysis, deployment, and operations.
• Create intuitive experiences for highly technical users including autonomy engineers, software developers, operators, and mission planners.
• Simplify complex system architectures, data flows, infrastructure tooling, and AI workflows into understandable user experiences.
• Own the end-to-end experience of the product including training, documentation, tutorials, and overall workflows – help our users get the most of the product.

Strategic Product Leadership

• Partner closely with Product Managers to shape product vision, roadmap priorities, and go-to-market strategies.
• Drive alignment across Product, Engineering, Design, and Executive Leadership through compelling narratives, prototypes, and visual storytelling.
• Advocate for user-centered decision making in a highly technical and engineering-driven environment.

Design Practice, Systems & Organizational Scale

• Establish and evolve design standards, design systems, UX principles, and product design best practices across Shield AI.
• Raise the quality bar for product design, usability, consistency, and customer experience.
• Grow the product design function by mentoring a small team of designers, shaping design culture, and staying actively involved in critical design work.
• Champion design wins and impact across the organization, highlighting the important role design plays in delivering successful products.

AI-Native Product Design & Agentic Workflows

• Define the future user experience for AI-assisted autonomy development, simulation, testing, deployment, and operational workflows.
• Design human-AI collaboration models that enable users to effectively leverage AI agents, copilots, and foundation-model-powered systems.
• Partner with Product, AI Research, and Engineering teams to create new interaction patterns for agent orchestration, autonomy generation, scenario creation, test generation, and mission planning.
• Develop frameworks for trust, transparency, explainability, and human oversight within AI-assisted workflows.
• Help establish industry-leading design patterns for Physical AI development platforms and agent-driven software systems.