Director, Product Design

Department: Product

Location: United States, Remote, Canada

Employment Type: FullTime

At Replicant, we believe AI should work for people, starting with customer service. Thats why we built a platform that helps contact centers resolve more requests, proactively identify issues, and improve agent performance with AI-powered conversation intelligence and AI agents that act like your best reps.

Our AI agents handle millions of calls every month for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth innovators. From processing payments to booking appointments and authenticating users, they help customers get what they need instantly, 24/7. Meanwhile, our real-time conversation insights help contact center leaders coach better and improve every interaction.

Were leading the shift from legacy systems to AI-first service, powered by large language models (LLMs) and designed for enterprise scale, security, and empathy. If youre excited by the potential of LLMs, voice AI, and building category-defining technology with a kind, ambitious team, youll love it here.

Were building the design practice at Replicant, and this role leads it. Youd report directly to the VP of Product and lead a team of three including yourself: a Lead/Principal Product Designer youll help define and hire, and our Conversation Design Lead. The role is weighted roughly 80% hands-on in the work and 20% leading the practice. We mean that ratio literally, and wed rather tell you now than have you discover it in month two. If youre looking to move fully out of the work and into management, this isnt that job.

You should know the rest of the context going in. The scope is large from day one, the company is engineering- and sales-led, and design has been attempted here twice and under-resourced both times. Youll meet people who are attached to how things already work, and moving them is the job rather than an obstacle to it. As the practice grows, this role grows with it.

WHAT YOULL DO

• Own the whole customer experience, interface included. A customers experience of Replicant runs from the sales conversation, through a deployment our delivery team configures, into an AI agent that talks to their customers, and back out through the analytics their operators read daily.

• Set the information architecture for a converging platform. Our conversation intelligence and agent-building products grew separately and are now becoming one product. You decide what the objects are, what theyre called, and how someone moves between them.

• Own the design systems architecture and the rules around it. The foundation exists — components in Figma and in Storybook. Whats missing is a pattern language, documented decisions about when to use what, and a contribution model engineers can build against. You set that architecture, govern it, and are accountable for it existing.

• Extend designs influence past the work you do yourself. Much of the customer-facing experience here gets shaped by people outside your team: product managers, delivery engineers who configure agents, solutions engineers in demos. Raising the bar means influencing them, giving them something good enough to follow, and telling them no when it matters.

• Drive rapid prototype-and-validation loops. Youll talk to internal customers, contact center operators and turn what you hear into design decisions, owning method as well as findings. You’ll create and drive a best-in-class prototype-and-validate loop.

• Bring product design and conversation design together. Our product is a conversation, so weve put both disciplines in one practice. You own how they come together and the research practice underneath both.

WHAT YOULL BRING

• You think in systems and journeys. Before asking which control a step needs, you ask whether the step needs to exist. Youve designed across touchpoints that werent all interfaces: a call, a handoff, an email, a conversation with a human agent.

• You have a real HCI or interaction-design foundation. You can reason from first principles about how people perceive, learn, form expectations, and recover from error, rather than from patterns youve seen in other products. Voice, conversational, and graphical interfaces all sit inside our product, and we need someone who can move between them without starting over each time.

• Youve driven change through resistance. Youve moved an entrenched team over months, not just changed one executives mind in one meeting. You can describe what you were up against and what it took.

• You think in business terms without being asked. Youve spent time close to the PM role, or worked with product closely enough that you think that way anyway. You can point to specific decisions that changed because of a conversation you personally had with a customer.

• Youve governed a design system, not only built one. Contribution, documentation, deprecation, and the arguments that come with them. You can describe a time you told someone no and why. The governance matters more to us than how many components you drew.

• You find the problems and set your own priorities. You identify opportunities the team hadnt seen and make the case for them. You converge without being pushed and escalate the right things at the right time.

• Youre AI-native in your practice. You use these tools in real design work and have earned opinions about where they help and where they degrade quality. Youve built workflows or assets other people adopted.

• You lead people and hold a room. Setting direction, giving hard feedback, running a critique, growing someones craft, and hiring. You can also hold your position in front of executives and customers. Formal management experience helps; evidence that designers got better working with you matters more than a title.

REQUIREMENTS

• Based in a US or Canadian timezone

• 10+ years of product design experience

• Experience leading or growing designers, whether or not you had the title

• Experience owning design for an enterprise or operational product

We care about the scope of what youve owned, not years on a résumé. If youre unsure whether youre at this level, apply anyway. Wed rather assess it than have you self-select out.

NICE TO HAVE

• Figma fluency on the system side: components, variants, libraries, variables, tokens. Enough to hold your hire to a standard and to work in the files yourself.

• Comfort moving between Figma and code (Storybook, shadcn/ui, Tailwind, or tools like Cursor and Claude Code). If you want to pick up UI-level changes yourself, thats open to you with preview environments and engineering review.

• Experience designing AI or conversational products, especially where the output was non-deterministic and you had to design failure states, trust, correction, and recovery.

• Experience with operational or contact center tooling.

• Experience defining a design practice from close to nothing.

• Experience leading designers across more than one discipline — product, conversation, content, or research.

For all full-time employees, we offer:

🌴 In-person connection that counts: company-wide offsites and smaller team gatherings designed to make remote work feel personal

🖥️ Tech & learning stipend: Conferences, books, courses — interested? We’ll fund them

📍 Remote by design: We’re distributed — no guilt about life events, we trust you to manage your calendar

🏋️ Health & wellness: Flexible vacations, paid sabbatical after 5 years, comprehensive benefits, plus a stipend to support your physical and mental well-being

💸 Compensation that matches your impact: competitive salaries in the company you’re helping to build

📈 Equity with upside: We believe in shared ownership—You’ll own a real piece of a fast-growing AI company

Our Values

Replicant has three core values. It is critical that everyone who joins the team feels excited and moved by these values as every new team member makes an impact on our culture.

Blade Runners: We take ownership and pride to influence the outcomes of our goals. We are successful, and like a Blade Runner, use the tools at our disposal to reach our objectives. We value open and honest communication and proactively seek feedback along the way. We are a company driven to grow and achieve both individually and as a team.

Bread Makers: We are humble and strive toward an egalitarian culture. No task is too big or too small. We work together to achieve our goals and develop our company mission. We believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts in everything that we do.

Självdistans (Self-Distance): Självdistans is Swedish for self-distance. Its the ability to critically reflect on oneself and ones relations from an external perspective. With this in mind, we act with objectivity and always remember that we are not our work. Theres no perfect science to growing a team or business, but we trust everyone at Replicant to point out our blind spots and humbly admit their own.

Replicant is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, diverse and equitable workplace that is built on trust, support and respect. We welcome all individuals and do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, colour, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, marital status, pregnancy, sex, citizenship, education, languages spoken or veteran status. Accommodation is available upon request at any point during our recruitment process. If you require an accommodation, please speak to your talent acquisition partner or email us at talent@replicant.ai and we’ll work to meet your needs.