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Salary: USD 305,000 - 345,000 / annual
Algolia is the retrieval intelligence layer powering over 1.7 trillion queries annually for 18,000+ customers. The company is redefining search and product discovery as AI agents increasingly act on behalf of users, making the interfaces that remain—where humans direct, constrain, and supervise intelligent systems—more critical than ever.
You will lead Algolia's Application Layer organization, owning the product surfaces where developers, merchandisers, and business teams build, configure, and optimize search and AI experiences. You will also oversee Satellite, Algolia's design component library that powers consistency and velocity across all Algolia products. This role sits at the center of two foundational strategic bets: becoming the retrieval and intelligence layer for agentic AI while deepening the hybrid AI search moat.
Three core design challenges define your mandate:
1. **Automation with Control**: Close the gap between AI ease-of-use and customer reality. Design interfaces where business users set goals and constraints that guide AI behavior with transparency and explainability built in. Customers demand deterministic control—they need to understand why Product A outranks Product B.
2. **Simplicity as a Moat**: Algolia's developer advantage depends on relative simplicity. As platform capability grows, abstractions must improve faster than complexity. The application layer is where this battle is won or lost.
3. **Time-to-First-Intelligence**: Own the product-led experience enabling builders to go from signup to a working, intelligent experience in minutes. Re-earn developer affinity with each new generation of builders through frictionless onboarding.
**What You'll Own:**
- Product design vision and strategy for the entire application experience—from developer onboarding through enterprise-grade agent orchestration—tied to measurable customer outcomes (adoption, performance, production impact)
- AI design standards for the company: interaction patterns for agentic UX including trust and transparency, human-in-the-loop controls, streaming and non-deterministic states, explainability of relevance and ranking, graceful failure of probabilistic systems
- Satellite Design System as a product: roadmap, governance, contribution model, adoption metrics, accessibility, and evolution into an AI-native system with primitives for conversational and agentic interfaces consumable by both humans and AI coding tools
- A technical product design organization (product designers, design engineers, UX researchers, content designers) including hiring, coaching, and developing design leadership
- Quality bar enforcement—nothing reaches market unless it meets or exceeds the usability and performance standards of core search
- Executive partnership with Product, Engineering, and GTM, representing design at the leadership table
You need to be AI-native: a leader who designs with AI (AI-assisted design workflows, design-to-code pipelines), designs for AI (agentic, conversational, and generative interfaces), and builds a design organization whose operating model assumes AI as a core collaborator—humans shifting into supervisory and judgment roles as execution is delegated to systems.
**Requirements:**
- 15+ years in product design with 6+ years leading design organizations (managers of managers) at B2B SaaS or developer-platform companies
- Demonstrated AI-native design leadership: shipped AI/ML-powered product experiences (conversational, agentic, or generative) with an articulated point of view on AI design patterns backed by shipped work
- Technical depth: comfort with front-end fundamentals (React, component architecture, design tokens), APIs, and how LLM-based systems behave (latency, hallucination, non-determinism) and how those constraints shape interface decisions; ability to review PR conversations and hold your own in architecture discussions
- Proven ownership of a complex technical application experience serving developer and business audiences
- Hands-on experience building or scaling a design system with real cross-org adoption as a product with customers, roadmap, and governance
- AI-augmented personal practice: daily use of AI tools in your own workflow and modernization of how teams work, not just what they ship
- Executive presence: ability to translate design impact into business terms with C-level peers
- Record of growing teams and developing design leaders, not just shipping artifacts
**Nice to Haves:**
- Experience in search, discovery, e-commerce, or data-intensive platforms
- Background as a design engineer, UX engineer, or former developer
- Published thinking (talks, writing) on AI design patterns or design systems
