Director, Product Design

About this role

At Replicant, we believe AI should work for people, starting with customer service. That's 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.

We're 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 you're excited by the potential of LLMs, voice AI, and building category-defining technology with a kind, ambitious team, you'll love it here.

We're building the design practice at Replicant, and this role leads it. You'd report directly to the VP of Product and lead a team of three including yourself: a Lead/Principal Product Designer you'll 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 we'd rather tell you now than have you discover it in month two. If you're looking to move fully out of the work and into management, this isn't 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. You'll 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 YOU'LL DO

- Own the whole customer experience, interface included. A customer's 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 they're called, and how someone moves between them.

- Own the design system's architecture and the rules around it. The foundation exists — components in Figma and in Storybook. What's 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 design's 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. You'll 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 we've put both disciplines in one practice. You own how they come together and the research practice underneath both.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- You think in systems and journeys. Before asking which control a step needs, you ask whether the step needs to exist. You've designed across touchpoints that weren't 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 you've 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.

- You've driven change through resistance. You've moved an entrenched team over months, not just changed one executive's mind in one meeting. You can describe what you were up against and what it took.

- You think in business terms without being asked. You've 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.

- You've 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 hadn't seen and make the case for them. You converge without being pushed and escalate the right things at the right time.

- You're 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. You've built workflows or assets other people adopted.

- You lead people and hold a room. Setting direction, giving hard feedback, running a critique, growing someone's 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

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