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Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services, automating loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks and specialty lenders. The company is backed by a16z and Y Combinator, has raised $75M in Series A funding, achieved mid-eight figure ARR in under two years, and serves over 20% of the auto lending industry.
As the first product designer, you will own the full design lifecycle from customer research and early concepts through launch and iteration. Your responsibilities include designing how customers configure, test, launch, monitor, and improve AI agents; building workflows for conversation review, quality assurance, approvals, escalations, and human intervention; improving how agents communicate across voice, text, chat, and email; and making agent performance and behavior transparent to customers.
You will simplify complex, data-heavy servicing workflows, work directly with customers to understand needs and test ideas, and partner closely with product and engineering to shape priorities and ship quickly. You'll establish Salient's design system and shared product patterns, creating consistency across five live agents and future products. You'll use Figma, rapid prototypes, and AI tools to test ideas quickly and help define how the design function grows.
The role requires 5+ years of product design experience, with demonstrated expertise in AI-powered products, agents, copilots, or human-in-the-loop systems. You should have experience designing complex B2B, enterprise, operational, or technical products, with a portfolio showing work you personally owned from ambiguous problems through launch. Strong skills in interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and systems thinking are essential. Experience designing monitoring, analytics, evaluation, or exception-management workflows is highly valued.
You'll work directly with customers, influence product decisions beyond execution, and have built or significantly improved design systems. You should understand how non-deterministic AI behavior affects trust, control, and product design, and be comfortable partnering closely with engineers through implementation. The team works approximately 60 hours per week, with four days in-person collaboration at the San Francisco office and one remote day.
