Senior Designer

Senior Designer – Research/Corpus Focus

SugarAI is redefining CRM for the age of AI. We're delivering on the original promise of CRM—turning fragmented customer and revenue signals into clear, prioritized action. Instead of more dashboards or surface-level insights, we help teams focus on what matters most and know exactly what to do next. More than two decades after our founding, we're entering a new chapter with clarity and momentum—building intelligent, intuitive solutions that work within the flow of how teams actually sell and serve. We're focused on solving complex, real-world challenges where relationships, context, and precision make all the difference. Our global team is united by a shared commitment to impact, ownership, and continuous growth. We create an environment where thoughtful ideas move quickly, where people are trusted to lead, and where flexibility supports how great work gets done. If you're excited to help shape what's next in AI-driven CRM—and build technology that drives real outcomes—we'd love to meet you.

We're hiring a Senior Designer – Research/Corpus Focus to join our design team as a designer-first practitioner who also brings the research depth our team is actively building toward.

Like every senior designer here, you'll be embedded on a sprint team—owning discovery, flows, prototyping, and UI craft end-to-end. What makes this role distinct is that you're the person the team turns to when a decision needs real evidence behind it, not just a fast assumption. You'll also be the primary owner of our design corpus: the structured, evidence-backed documentation that captures design decisions, product knowledge, and classification rationale, and that the design agents this team builds and maintains depend on to operate correctly.

We're not looking for a PhD-level researcher who produces comprehensive studies over many months. We're looking for a designer with a genuine passion for research who knows how to get to a defensible answer in days or weeks—and who wants to work somewhere that actually values that instinct rather than treating it as a speed bump.

This role operates on a hybrid model, with a mix of remote work and in-office collaboration at our Denver, CO location, specifically, working in-office a minimum of three days per week. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time. Portfolio required. We'll review your design work to confirm craft bar. What we're specifically evaluating is whether you can show us a moment where you established evidence for something previously assumed and how that changed the outcome. Candidates should be prepared to walk through this example in detail during interviews.

Impact you will make:

• Lead end-to-end design for your sprint team—discovery, flows, wireframes, prototypes, and detailed UI—with full ownership of your product area.
• Own curation and verification of the design corpus for your area: product knowledge, personas, service blueprints, and classification files, ensuring entries are evidence-backed rather than asserted.
• Know when to run a quick study and when to trust prior evidence—running qualitative or quantitative research when a decision genuinely needs it, and moving fast when it doesn't.
• Verify classification claims against actual evidence before work proceeds—holding the line on "known/known" status even under timeline pressure.
• Write corpus documentation for a dual audience: legible to teammates, and structured precisely enough for an AI agent to parse and classify against without ambiguity.
• Build, configure, and maintain AI-assisted workflow loops alongside your peers—and hold the line on research and verification as steps that don't get automated away.
• Review AI agent outputs that touch your area—classification decisions, briefs, spec verification—and flag drift between what the corpus says and what agents produce.
• Build and maintain design system components and patterns with the same craft bar as the rest of the team.
• Mentor peers on research methods and evidence standards as the corpus becomes a bigger part of how the team works.

What you will bring:

• Five or more years designing complex, web-based application UIs (SaaS/B2B preferred), with demonstrated ownership of systems-level work—not just shipped screens, but decisions about component architecture, cross-feature consistency, or ambiguous problem spaces. Total years designing is necessary but not sufficient; we're looking for time spent at this level of complexity, not just time in the seat.
• A portfolio that includes at least one instance where you established evidence for something previously assumed—a classification, a persona, a stated user need—and can speak to how it changed the outcome. Research participation isn't enough; we want to see research that moved a decision.
• Strong instincts for when to run research vs. when existing evidence is sufficient—you've worked in sprint environments and know how to be rigorous without being slow.
• Design system creation and management, rapid prototyping, and systems-level design—able to build and maintain component-based systems and think at the level of reusable patterns, not one-off screens.
• Strong structured/technical writing—comfortable producing evidence-backed documentation with consistent taxonomy, since some of your writing will be consumed by AI systems as well as people.
• Technical fluency sufficient to build and maintain design agents—comfortable reading and working with HTML/CSS/React, participating in a Git-based workflow, and configuring LLM-driven workflows and agentic tooling as a first-class design responsibility, not a handoff. In this role, building is part of designing.
• Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG) and inclusive design practices.
• Demonstrated intellectual honesty under pressure—willing to flag an unverified assumption or push back on a premature conclusion even when it's inconvenient for timeline.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience designing AI-powered product features—predictive workflows, generative interfaces, or human-in-the-loop patterns.
• Experience building or maintaining a structured knowledge base or content model intended for reuse by other systems, not just people.
• Experience designing for enterprise applications, CRM, or complex data-heavy workflows.
• Domain familiarity in B2B verticals (manufacturing, distribution, financial services).
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in UX Design, HCI, or a related field.

We understand that no candidate is perfectly qualified for any job. Experience comes in different forms; many skills are transferable; and passion goes a long way. Even more important than your resume is a clear demonstration of dedication, impact, and the ability to thrive in a fluid and collaborative environment. We want you to learn new things in this role, and we encourage you to apply if your experience is close to what we're looking for. We also know that diversity of background and thought makes for better problem solving and more creative thinking, which is why we're dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team.

Benefits and perks:

• Excellent healthcare package for you and your family
• Savings and investment—401(k) match
• Unlimited paid time off
• Paid parental leave
• Online legal services (Rocket Lawyer)
• Financial planning services (Origin)
• Discounted pet insurance (Embrace Pet Insurance)
• Corporate benefit program (Working Advantage). This benefit offers you exclusive travel and entertainment offers and special discounts that are not available to the general public
• Health and wellness reimbursement program
• Travel discounts
• Educational resources—career & personal development program
• Employee referral bonus program
• We are a merit-based company—many opportunities to learn, excel, and grow your career!