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, scenar

• 10+ years of experience in Product Design, UX Design, Human Factors, or related fields. • Proven track record designing and shipping complex technical products, developer tools, platforms, infrastructure software, data-dense applications, or enterprise systems. • Deep technical fluency and ability to effectively collaborate with senior engineering leaders on architecture, technical constraints, and software development workflows. • Strong experience conducting user research and translating insights into product strategy and design solutions. • Proven ability to influence product direction and organizational decisions without direct authority. • Strong understanding of AI-powered product experiences, including conversational interfaces, human-in-the-loop workflows, AI-assisted decision making, and agent-based systems. • Experience defining new user experiences in ambiguous technology spaces where industry standards and workflows are still emerging. • Experience building and retaining high-performing design teams. • Strong portfolio showcasing both strategic thinking and hands-on design execution. • Background designing developer platforms, SDKs, cloud infrastructure products, DevOps tooling, or engineering productivity tools. • Direct work on AI/ML platforms, MLOps workflows, foundation-model-enabled products, copilots, or agentic systems. • Familiarity with autonomy, robotics, simulation, digital twins, mission systems, physical AI, or related development workflows including testing, evaluation, deployment, and operations. • Portfolio examples involving command-and-control systems, mission-planning interfaces, operational dashboards, or real-time decision-support tools. • Ability to design across integrated hardware/software systems. • Domain exposure to defense technology, aerospace, robotics, or other regulated, mission-critical, or high-consequence operational environments.

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.  What you'll do: 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. Required qualifications: • 10+ years of experience in Product Design, UX Design, Human Factors, or related fields. • Proven track record designing and shipping complex technical products, developer tools, platforms, infrastructure software, data-dense applications, or enterprise systems. • Deep technical fluency and ability to effectively collaborate with senior engineering leaders on architecture, technical constraints, and software development workflows. • Strong experience conducting user research and translating insights into product strategy and design solutions. • Proven ability to influence product direction and organizational decisions without direct authority. • Strong understanding of AI-powered product experiences, including conversational interfaces, human-in-the-loop workflows, AI-assisted decision making, and agent-based systems. • Experience defining new user experiences in ambiguous technology spaces where industry standards and workflows are still emerging. • Experience building and retaining high-performing design teams. • Strong portfolio showcasing both strategic thinking and hands-on design execution. Preferred qualifications: • Background designing developer platforms, SDKs, cloud infrastructure products, DevOps tooling, or engineering productivity tools. • Direct work on AI/ML platforms, MLOps workflows, foundation-model-enabled products, copilots, or agentic systems. • Familiarity with autonomy, robotics, simulation, digital twins, mission systems, physical AI, or related development workflows including testing, evaluation, deployment, and operations. • Portfolio examples involving command-and-control systems, mission-planning interfaces, operational dashboards, or real-time decision-support tools. • Ability to design across integrated hardware/software systems. • Domain exposure to defense technology, aerospace, robotics, or other regulated, mission-critical, or high-consequence operational environments. Full-time regular employee offer package: Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity   Temporary employee offer package: Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)   Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.   ###   Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportu