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Replicant is building an AI-first customer service platform that helps contact centers resolve requests, identify issues, and improve agent performance using conversation intelligence and AI agents. The company processes millions of calls monthly for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth innovators.
You will lead Replicant's design practice, reporting directly to the VP of Product. The role is structured as 80% hands-on design work and 20% team leadership, managing a team of three including a Lead/Principal Product Designer and Conversation Design Lead. This is not a pure management track—you remain deeply involved in design execution.
Key responsibilities include owning the complete customer experience across the sales conversation, deployment configuration, AI agent interactions, and analytics dashboards. You'll set the information architecture for a converging platform where conversation intelligence and agent-building products are becoming unified. You'll establish and govern the design system's architecture, including pattern language, documented decisions, and contribution models for engineers.
You'll extend design influence across the organization by raising standards for product managers, delivery engineers, and solutions engineers who shape customer-facing experiences. You'll drive rapid prototype-and-validation loops by talking directly to internal customers and contact center operators. You'll bring product design and conversation design disciplines together, owning how they integrate and the research practice supporting both.
The role comes with significant context: the scope is large from day one, the company is engineering- and sales-led, and design has been attempted twice before and under-resourced both times. You'll need to move entrenched teams and influence people attached to existing ways of working. As the practice grows, the role grows with it.
You should have 10+ years of product design experience with a strong HCI or interaction-design foundation. You think in systems and journeys, reason from first principles about human perception and error recovery, and can move fluidly between voice, conversational, and graphical interfaces. You've driven change through organizational resistance over months, not just influenced single decisions. You think in business terms, have spent time close to product management, and can point to specific customer-driven decisions you personally influenced.
You've governed a design system (not just built one), managing contribution, documentation, and deprecation. You're comfortable telling people no and explaining why. You identify opportunities the team hasn't seen and make the case for them. You're AI-native in your practice, using these tools in real design work with earned opinions about where they help and where they degrade quality. You lead people effectively, give hard feedback, run critiques, grow designer craft, and can hold your position in front of executives and customers.
