Principal Product Designer (R5250)

Shield AI is a defense-tech company focused on protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. The company is seeking a Principal Product Designer to design and prototype agentic AI and enterprise applications, build production React/TypeScript experiences, and establish reusable interaction and design patterns across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build the user experience for agentic AI products across the office of the CTO: an enterprise knowledge assistant (Brain), an agent-driven engineering platform (Springboard), and enterprise AI/data applications
• Prototype in code. Ship working React/TypeScript implementations, not mockups — then land them in production with the product teams
• Design the core interaction patterns of agentic software: streaming responses, citations and provenance, multi-modal input, artifact sharing, and human-in-the-loop review and approval surfaces
• Design interfaces for foundation-model based autonomy architectures and model lifecycle tooling: evaluation dashboards, trace inspection, observability, and verification surfaces
• Conduct user research across engineers, operators, and executives; define personae and translate findings into design decisions
• Investigate competing agentic and enterprise AI products; synthesize findings for engineering and product leadership
• Establish reusable design patterns and a component vocabulary for AI applications across the organization
• Drive adoption: instrument what you ship, watch real usage, and iterate daily

Requirements:

• 12+ years designing and building production software interfaces, with end-to-end ownership from research through shipped product
• Expert-level React/TypeScript; you write production-quality front-end code, not just prototypes
• Portfolio of shipped tools or applications demonstrating strong interaction design and visual craft
• Hands-on experience designing LLM-powered experiences: streaming, progressive rendering, loading states, context and conversation management
• Deep knowledge of client and UI state management, the DOM, browser APIs, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events
• Experience running user research and usability testing, and acting on the results
• Strong software hygiene: Git, code review, testing, CI/CD
• Fluid intelligence that allows one to operate effectively in ambiguous conditions while finding opportunities to drive technical efforts and force multiply
• Experience with Linux, Docker, and a major cloud platform (Azure, GCP, AWS)
• This role requires travel to a Shield AI location 1-3 times per quarter
• Experience designing developer tools, IDEs, or engineering workflow products
• Data visualization experience (D3, WebGL, dashboards); geospatial a plus
• Experience building or maintaining a design system
• Experience designing debugging/inspection UIs for generative AI systems
• Experience with Electron (or similar)
• Experience with user experience design for video games or interactive media
• Experience designing for "low code" or "no code" systems
• Comfort reading C++ and/or Python and/or Go