Staff Product Designer

The Staff Product Designer will own the product's design architecture, defining interaction primitives and conceptual models across existing and new product surfaces. They will also set cross-product design direction, partner with field engineering and UX research, define AI capability interactions, and establish the foundational design system.

Responsibilities

• Own the product's design architecture
• Define the interaction primitives, conceptual models, and design principles that govern how users understand and work within nTop, across the existing workstation product and the new surfaces being built
• Set cross-product design direction
• Identify systemic inconsistencies and opportunities before they become entrenched, and drive alignment across product management and software engineering
• Work the problem with the people closest to it: partner with our forward-deployed field engineering team, who work directly with customers on real programs, and our UX researcher to identify the friction points that most affect users and our business
• Define how AI capabilities reach users: define the interaction patterns that make these capabilities useful and interpretable in practice
• Establish the design foundation: as the sole designer on the product team, create the design system, principles, and documentation that the software engineering organization can build against, and that future designers can build on
• Partner with product and technology leadership: work directly with the VP of Product and CTO on roadmap decisions and architectural trade-offs

Requirements

• 8+ years of product design experience on complex, expert-grade software, including engineering tools, developer platforms, data or simulation systems, or equivalent
• Demonstrated staff-level scope: you have owned design systems or platform architecture, not just features, and can point to organizational impact from decisions that outlasted your direct involvement
• Systems thinker: skilled at designing abstractions, states, and constraints that remain coherent and extensible as the product grows
• Strong information architecture instincts for expert users in constraint-heavy, precision workflows
• Able to build alignment without formal authority, across software engineering, product management, and executive leadership, through clarity, craft, and well-reasoned argument
• Comfortable in technical depth: you don't need to write code, but you need to participate as a peer in conversations about architecture, performance, and trade-offs
• Familiarity with computational design, parametric modeling, visual programming, or physics-based simulation is a strong plus
• Experience designing for AI-assisted workflows, including interaction patterns for uncertainty, model transparency, and human override

Benefits

• Opportunity to work with a growth-stage company with deep roots in computational geometry
• Real weight: rebuild and lead the design function, with direct influence over the full product experience and a seat at the table for strategic decisions
• Competitive compensation and benefits package, including paid health, vision, dental, and disability coverage

Key Skills