Lead Product Designer, AI & Experience
Hillspire / Office of Eric Schmidt · New York, NY
Design + UX
Partners & Advocates
$190,000 -
$245,000
Per Year
Posted 2 hours ago
Featured Job
The Role
The Technical Projects Group (TPG), part of the Office of Eric Schmidt, is a focused group of technologists dedicated to developing impactful solutions for the greater good. The Lead Product Designer will own the design vision, shape user interaction paradigms around AI, and guide how the platform communicates trust, accessibility, and impact. This role will report directly to the Product Director of the Technical Projects Group.
Key responsibilities for this role include the following:
Design Leadership & Product Ownership
- Own the design vision and execution for our civic engagement platform, creating user experiences that transform complex data into compelling, actionable intelligence.
- Design user-empowering AI interfaces that enable organizations to generate their own insights and content—balancing creative flexibility with guided workflows that drive meaningful outcomes.
- Make opinionated design decisions about information hierarchy and user journeys, strategically surfacing the most important data and actions to maximize civic impact and engagement.
- Pioneer change management through design by creating intuitive flows and progressive feature adoption that helps traditional organizations embrace AI-powered workflows.
Visual & Interaction Design
- Build and evolve our visual identity and brand expression across the platform—establishing design patterns that communicate trustworthiness, authority, and accessibility in the civic space.
- Design dynamic, responsive interfaces for AI-generated content that maintain quality and consistency even when users create custom reports, dashboards, and communication materials.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner closely with product and engineering to define interaction paradigms for LLM-driven features—from prompt design and result presentation to error handling and user guidance.
- Conduct targeted user research with civic leaders and organizers to understand decision-making processes, validate design directions, and identify opportunities for deeper platform integration.
- Establish and maintain design systems that support both structured data experiences and flexible content creation tools, ensuring brand coherence across user-generated outputs.
Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
- Strategic Design Leadership: You think beyond screens to understand business objectives, user ecosystems, and product market fit. You can articulate design decisions in terms of strategic outcomes and user value.AI/LLM Product Fluency: You know how to design user experiences around AI—such as building prompt interfaces, revealing AI-generated insights progressively, and handling errors or unpredictable outputs gracefully.
- Full-Spectrum Design Skills: You're strong in UX research and strategy, highly capable in UI design and interaction patterns, and comfortable with visual design when needed. You know when to focus on each discipline.
- Technical Collaboration: You work seamlessly with engineers, understand frontend constraints and possibilities, and can iterate quickly on implementation without losing design quality.
- Research & Validation Expertise: You design and conduct user interviews, usability testing, and behavioral analysis. You synthesize insights into actionable product and design recommendations.
- Team Building & Resource Strategy: You've hired, managed, or closely collaborated with contractors, freelancers, and extended design teams. You thrive in lean, startup-like environments and know how to strategically scale design capacity through external partnerships while maintaining quality and cohesion.
- Data-Informed Design: You're comfortable with light data analysis—interpreting user analytics, A/B test results, and engagement metrics to inform design decisions.
Required Experience:
- 10+ years of product design experience, including senior or lead roles where you've owned end-to-end product experiences.
- Proven track record designing products that help users make sense of complex information and take meaningful action—whether through data visualization, workflow optimization, or insight-driven interfaces.
- Strong collaboration history working with engineering teams on frontend implementation, especially in fast-moving startup or product development environments.
- Experience in engagement-focused domains—political tech, social media platforms, advertising tools, or other spaces where design directly impacts how people connect, communicate, and take action.
- Familiarity with AI/ML product development, prompt engineering, or designing for conversational interfaces.
- Background in user research methodologies and translating insights into product strategy and design direction.
- Bonus: Experience with design systems, component libraries, or other scalable design infrastructure.
