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Customer.io is seeking a Principal Product Designer—the highest individual contributor design role in the organization. This is a leadership position without direct management responsibilities, where influence is exerted through craft excellence, vision-setting, and partnership with product and engineering leadership.
The role sits at a transformational moment for Customer.io. The company powers automated communication for over 9,000 companies, handling billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS daily. You will straddle two concurrent challenges: maintaining quality and coherence in the current product while redesigning the platform for a new generation of builders, with particular emphasis on AI-native and agentic interfaces.
Key responsibilities include: shaping and communicating a company-wide design vision; driving strategic direction of Pluma, the design system; closing gaps between design intent and shipped product; designing for developer and builder audiences (CLI-native flows, API-first onboarding); leading design of agentic and human-AI surfaces; partnering with product and engineering on strategy before direction is set; developing an AI product design philosophy as a framework for the team; leading design reviews for major initiatives; mentoring Staff designers; and contributing to hiring and calibration.
You will work on interfaces built for people who type before they click, bringing design thinking into strategy conversations early. The role requires staying close to implementation—catching divergence between design and code, and fixing it directly when appropriate. You lead through clarity and example, not control, amplifying impact across the whole company through candid feedback, humility, and curiosity.
This is a fully remote role within the Americas timezone.
