About the role

⚠️ Please read first

This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco (Presidio) - we work from the office 5 days a week.
You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.
We require US work authorisation , but are open to O-1 visa sponsorship for truly exceptional candidates.

About the role

We're looking for a Product Designer to join our team and reimagine how humans collaborate with AI. You'll be designing the interfaces (no, not just screens) that make collaborating with AI and building AI assistants feel as intuitive as having a conversation with a friend, colleague or employee. This role requires someone who can navigate extreme complexity while maintaining an unwavering focus on delight and the experience for the user. You'll work directly with our engineers to create design patterns that don't exist yet, shaping how millions will build and collaborate with AI. As an early team member, you'll have outsized impact on our product's evolution and help establish design as a core competitive advantage.

Heads-up: while we don’t use seniority titles at Wordware, this role is intended for designers with 5+ years of experience who are already operating at a Senior, Staff, or Principal level.

What you'll be doing:

You'll be designing experiences that bridge the gap between human intent and AI capability, making the complex feel magical.

Design end-to-end user flows for AI agent creation, from natural language input to deployment
Work platform agnostically - you should be comfortable working on mobile interfaces, desktop, and responsive web
Develop interaction patterns for real-time feedback where the assistant comes alive in the experience, while surfacing the right plumbing and mechanics needed in a delightful unobtrusive way
Build and maintain our design system, ensuring consistency across rapidly evolving product surfaces
Prototype novel interfaces using real AI models to validate design decisions with actual system behavior and real users
Partner with engineering to ensure designs perform beautifully at scale
Conduct user research to uncover unmet needs and opportunities
Design for progressive disclosure, revealing complexity only when users need it
Create motion and micro-interactions that make synchronous and asynchronous AI processes feel responsive
Influence product strategy by identifying opportunities through design exploration

You should probably:

This role demands someone who thrives at the intersection of design craft and technical systems.

Have designed complex products that achieved both usability and adoption goals
Demonstrate deep understanding of information and interaction architecture for multi-platform systems
Show expertise in interaction design, including keyboard-first interfaces
Bring strong visual design skills with proven ability to create cohesive, scalable design systems
Excel at prototyping, from paper sketches to high-fidelity interactive demos (bonus: the closer to real code the better)
Understand interface development concepts and limitations for mobile and web to design feasible solutions
Navigate ambiguity comfortably, creating structure from undefined problem spaces
Communicate design rationale effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Balance user needs with technical constraints without compromising on quality
Show evidence of shipping products that pushed the boundaries of what's possible
Demonstrate systems thinking and ability to see connections others miss

If you have:

These capabilities would make you exceptionally suited for shaping the future of AI development.

Built products using LLMs or other AI technologies as a designer or builder
Digital native who leverages AI as a creative partner - using generative models and AI tools as a real competitive advantage in your workflow
Thrive in an AI-native environment where pushing boundaries with these tools is part of the daily practice
Motion design skills for creating fluid, responsive interfaces
Code proficiency enabling you to build functional prototypes or contribute to implementation
Experience with design engineering, bridging design and development workflows
Track record of designing for uncertainty and evolving system capabilities
Background in conversational UI or natural language interfaces
Published writing or talks about product design
Experience designing for both technical and non-technical users in the same product

About Wordware

AI Agents have arrived. They are powerful enough to read, plan, and act across your everyday life and work. The question is no longer whether they can run canned demos to check the weather, it’s whether real teams can rely on them for critical work. We optimize for adoption over spectacle: useful, accountable systems that help top professional complete real tasks.

About Wordware. Wordware is backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator, with a $30M seed round. Our beautiful, historic San Francisco office sits in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s full of plants and radiates innovation and calm. We genuinely love working together. At lunch we talk about alignment and AI consciousness, we have surfboards in the office ready to use, we take walking meetings on the beach and hang out after work at the bar or climbing wall. We work really hard because we care deeply about what we do.

About Sauna. Sauna is Wordware’s AI workspace for professionals. Think ‘Cursor for Knowledge Work’ and you’re halfway there. With explicit permission, it connects to tools like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, and thousands more, to gather the right context to move your work forward. It learns who you are, drafts and refines your documents, presentations, and datasets, researches across the web and your org’s internal knowledge, summarizes long threads to cut through the noise, proposes next steps, even acts on your behalf when enabled. You can work with Sauna live, side-by-side, or schedule jobs to run automatically in the background, with clear permissions and easy off-switches. Sauna brings the power of AI Agents to all professionals.

Startups are intense, but the intensity is intentional here. We work in focused sessions, cool down, and go again. You’ll have real ownership, clear outcomes, and the satisfaction of seeing your work land with customers, not months from now, but this week. If you’re joining Wordware, you’re choosing impact over spectacle. You’ll shape the product, the standards, and the way we work together. It’s demanding but humane: we write things down, respect time off, and prefer steady progress to late-night heroics.

Who thrives here? People who like small, correct moves that compound. People who stay calm when the plan changes and make the next good decision without drama. People who treat constraints as design inputs, not roadblocks. If you’ve built something from scratch, carried it through the unglamorous parts, and kept your standards high, you’ll feel at home.

We’re not optimizing for résumé lines; we’re optimizing for judgment. You don’t need to be loud. You do need to be reliable, curious, and willing to own outcomes.

We judge by what you build, not when you build it. Weekends are for life. Burnout doesn’t make good software. We’re aiming for something durable and generational, and that requires knowing when to push and when to recharge. If that balance and this mission resonate, we should talk.

Don't see your role? If what we’re building clicks for you and you’re exceptional, tell us. We’ll consider shaping a role around the right person.

How to stand out? Show us signal. Build something with Sauna, send a short note on what worked and what didn’t, or point out a concrete way to improve the product. Clarity beats volume. Initiative beats polish.

If you’re truly excellent, a LinkedIn link is enough—ping it to lucy[at]wordware.ai