Principal Product Designer

Principal Product Designer

Ireland - Remote

Contract

Day Rate

My client is building a new Centralized Product Design function as part of a global software engineering company — a small, senior team that goes where design is needed most and proves what great design partnership looks like. This is one of its core founding design roles.

The Role

As Principal Product Designer, you'll be a senior individual contributor who leads through the standard you set, the judgement you exercise and the influence you carry.

You'll define what great design looks like for the team and hold that standard across every engagement, every crit and every deliverable. You'll be the most trusted design voice in the room on the work itself, and the person who challenges us to do better when the bar isn't being met — regardless of who's in the room or what the pressure is.

You'll also be the person who makes this team's designers measurably better. Not through management, but through the rigor of your feedback, the clarity of your standards and the way you model what senior design thinking looks like in practice. In a team that exists partly to shift how design is perceived, you are the living proof of that case.

You'll use AI not as a workflow enhancement but as a lens through which you're actively rethinking what design practice looks like — and pulling the team forward with you.

What You'll Do

Define and own the quality standard across all team engagements — establishing what great looks like, reviewing work against it, and making sure every output reflects the level this team was built to deliver

Be the senior design authority on the work itself — making the smartest calls on direction, framing and quality, and holding that position under pressure from stakeholders, timelines and competing priorities

Build design credibility in rooms where it doesn't yet exist — walking into resistant product and engineering teams and changing the dynamic through the quality of your thinking and the confidence of your presence

Work upstream alongside strategic design leads — contributing to problem framing, vision work and organizational design challenges that sit well above the level of individual product delivery

Model and advance AI-enabled design practice — not just using tools, but actively exploring what AI changes about how this team thinks, decides and delivers, and bringing the rest of the team with you

Develop the designers around you through direct, rigorous feedback, pairing and critique — you raise the standard of every person you work alongside, and you do it in a way that builds capability rather than dependency

Build the evidence base — leading the team's case study and knowledge output so that every engagement produces proof of design's value, not just a deliverable

What You Bring To The Team

10+ years in product or UX/UI design with a portfolio that demonstrates sustained excellence across complex, multi-product environments and a clear point of view on what great looks like

A track record of raising the design bar in organizations where design influence had to be earned — you've been in rooms where design wasn't trusted and you changed that through craft, confidence and consistency

Genuine design authority — you have strong opinions about quality, you can articulate them to any audience, and you don't let the standard slide under pressure from timelines or stakeholders

Proven ability to lead through influence without authority — you've shaped the direction of complex initiatives, developed senior designers around you, and driven cultural change in a design function

Deep fluency across the full design spectrum — from upstream strategic framing to detailed UI craft — and the judgement to know which the moment calls for

Active, confident leadership of AI in design practice — you're not experimenting with AI, you're integrating it, and you have a clear point of view on what it changes and what it doesn't

Fluency in Figma and strong design system literacy

The kind of presence that makes a room better — calm under pressure, direct in feedback, generous with thinking, and relentless about the standard