Head of Product Design (R5776)

The role

Lead the user experience vision for Hivemind, Shield AI's autonomy development platform. Work on user research, product design, AI-assisted workflows, and a small team of designers.

What you will do

• Lead customer research to find pain points, workflows and product opportunities.
• Design end-to-end workflows across autonomy development, simulation, testing, deployment and operations.
• Create intuitive experiences for highly technical users such as autonomy engineers and developers.
• Own the product experience including training, documentation and tutorials.
• Partner with Product Managers on product vision, roadmap and go-to-market strategy.
• Establish design standards, design systems and UX principles.
• Mentor a small team of designers and shape design culture.
• Define the user experience for AI-assisted autonomy development and agent-driven workflows.
• Design human-AI collaboration models with trust, transparency and human oversight.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Product Design, UX Design, Human Factors or related fields.
• Proven track record designing and shipping complex technical products, developer tools, platforms or enterprise systems.
• Deep technical fluency to collaborate with senior engineering leaders on architecture and software workflows.
• Strong experience conducting user research and turning insights into product strategy and design.
• Proven ability to influence product direction without direct authority.
• Strong understanding of AI-powered product experiences, including conversational interfaces and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Experience defining new user experiences where industry standards are still emerging.
• Experience building and retaining high-performing design teams.
• Strong portfolio showing strategic thinking and hands-on design execution.

Nice to have

• Background designing developer platforms, SDKs, cloud infrastructure, DevOps tooling or engineering productivity tools.
• Direct work on AI/ML platforms, MLOps, foundation-model products, copilots or agentic systems.
• Familiarity with autonomy, robotics, simulation, digital twins or physical AI workflows.
• Portfolio examples with command-and-control systems, mission-planning interfaces or operational dashboards.
• Ability to design across integrated hardware and software systems.
• Domain exposure to defense technology, aerospace, robotics or regulated, mission-critical environments.

Benefits

• Bonus for full-time regular employees.
• Benefits for full-time regular employees.
• Equity for full-time regular employees.
• Temporary benefits package for temporary employees, applicable after 60 days of employment.

Before you apply

• All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check.
• Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits.

About the company

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company that builds intelligent systems to protect service members and civilians. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation technologies.