Principal Product Designer

Principal Product Designer Department: Gitwit Employment Type: Full Time Location: Tulsa, OK Compensation: $140,000 - $170,000 / year Description Gitwit is hiring a principal product designer to lead product experiences for new AI products. This is not a role for polishing someone else’s roadmap. You will help decide what the product should be, how the workflow should work, where the user needs to understand or approve what the system does, what should be tested first, and what should ship. We are looking for a high-agency product thinker who can turn ambiguous AI venture concepts into testable, usable, shippable product experiences. Gitwit is an AI-first venture studio built to find problems worth solving, validate them rigorously, and build the companies that earn the right to exist. We are on pace to launch 15+ ventures in the next four years. For a designer, that means repeated chances to work on the most interesting part of company building: the first version. You are not maintaining one mature product for years. You are helping create new companies from the beginning. Shaping the ambiguity, user proximity, product decisions, prototypes, first launches, early signal, and handoff to a founding team. The pace only works if design can make the first clear product calls before everything is figured out. We need someone who can jump into a half-formed venture, figure out what the product needs to become, and help the team learn before we overbuild. You come in as a design lead from day one. We launch around five companies a year, and one or two of them will be yours to lead across the year. You will own the product experience from early concept through prototype, first launch, user learning, and iteration. You will work shoulder to shoulder with discovery, product strategy, engineering, brand, and venture leadership to shape the first version of the company and product. The vision is shared. The product experience - how it works, where it earns trust, and where it gets out of the user’s way - is yours to lead. Early on, the work is hands-on and collaborative: wireframing in a room, shaping feature plans, prototyping with AI, sitting with users, and pulling apart what they say, what they do, where they hesitate, and what they actually need. You are never tossing screens over a wall. You build next to an engineer in tight rotation, make product calls, test them quickly, and keep the distance between decision and working product short. After the initial product, you stay close to what happens next. Analyzing what users understand, where they hesitate, what breaks down, and what the early signal suggests. You work with discovery, product strategy, and engineering to turn that learning into sharper product decisions and better next versions. When the product has enough shape and the right founding team is ready to carry it forward, you help make the handoff clean. Then you move on to the next early product problem. What You’ll Do Lead zero-to-one product design for new AI products, from blank canvas through first launch and iteration. Translate user observation, research, and usage signals into product hypotheses, experiments, and design decisions. Design AI workflows where the product may not behave the same way twice - including changing outputs, wrong or uncertain answers, human review, approval moments, fallback paths, and clear next steps. Generate multiple design directions, weigh tradeoffs, make the call, and explain the reasoning clearly. Prototype quickly to help the team learn what is real before overbuilding. Work tightly with product strategists, researchers, engineers, designers, and venture leaders to turn a promising idea into something real enough to test. Create clear, engineer-ready design systems for early products: flows, components, states, edge cases, interaction patterns, and implementation-ready specs. Bring discipline and meticulousness to how design gets built across the studio, so engineers are not guessing and each product does not have to reinvent the basics from scratch. Help the studio get smarter with each AI product by capturing what we learn about review, correction, approval, uncertainty, failure states, and user trust — and sharing those learnings clearly with the team so each new venture starts sharper than the last. In your first few months, you will have: Stepped into an active venture, understood the product direction quickly, and identified the first design moves that would reduce risk, test key assumptions, and help the team move faster. Taken ownership of a new venture concept from the beginning - helping shape the workflow, product direction, prototype, and first version the team can test. Helped run lightweight user tests or experiments with discovery and product strategy to validate core product assumptions. Converted early signal into prioritized design iterations. Created the early design system, flows, states, and specs that engineers need to build quickly and consistently without guessing. You do not need to be a machine learning expert. But you do need to be actively thinking about how AI changes product design. A lot of this work is not about adding AI to old software patterns. It is about rethinking the workflow itself: what the user gives the system, what the system does on its own, when the human needs control, where trust breaks, and what the product should do when the AI is wrong. In one venture, that might mean designing how a user reviews and corrects an AI-generated recommendation. In another, it might mean replacing a dashboard with a workflow that quietly watches, decides, asks for approval, and acts. The craft is changing. This work is less about pushing pixels around a fixed dashboard interface and more about designing how AI-enabled products help people get work done: what the system handles, what the user controls, where trust breaks, how mistakes get caught, and what happens next. We want a teammate who finds that shift exciting and has strong opinions about how the design job itself is changing. The Kind of Designer We’re Looking For 7+ years in product design, including at least 2 in a zero-to-one or early-stage context Expert-level Figma; familiarity with prototyping and AI-assisted design tools Experience shipping products, not just designing them Based in or willing to relocate to Tulsa, OK More than any particular background, we are looking for someone who has done early, ambiguous, zero-to-one work and wants more of it. If you see yourself in most of these, we should talk. Zero-to-one ownership. You have taken ambiguous product ideas from early concept to launch, and you can explain the tradeoffs that shaped the product. Product judgment under uncertainty. You can generate multiple directions, pick one, explain why, and define what would prove it wrong. Research-to-product synthesis. You can point to times when interviews, observations, or usage signals changed the product direction - and explain why. AI-native interaction thinking. You are already thinking beyond forms, dashboards, and deterministic flows toward workflows where AI handles work, exposes uncertainty, earns trust, and knows when to ask for human judgment. High-speed craft. You can move from sketch to prototype to implementation-ready detail without getting precious. Decisive product judgment. You can make a call before everything is certain, explain the reasoning, and keep the work moving. Clear cross-functional communication. You can bring engineers, strategists, researchers, and venture leaders into the thinking so decisions do not feel mysterious or disconnected. You should be the kind of designer who already has these instincts and finally wants a seat that lets you use them. This is not a clean-lane design job. If you want polished requirements, a tidy backlog, long cycles, layers of review, and a roadmap handed down from somewhere else, this will feel uncomfortable. We move quickly, with incomplete information, high trust, and a lot of direct collaboration. This is not a visual polish role either. Beautiful work matters here, but beautiful work alone will not win. We hire for product judgment: the ability to make sense of ambiguity, make testable calls, and ship learning. And this is not a brand design role. You do not need to invent a full identity system from scratch. But because our ventures are new, you do need to care about how the whole company shows up. You should be comfortable helping shape a deck, early website, prototype, or how the product is explained when it helps the venture become real. The product experience is where the bar is highest. We expect strong craft. We hire for strong thinking. What We Offer This role comes with the things strong engineers should expect: competitive salary, strong benefits, and meaningful equity in every venture the studio builds , but the real offer is bigger than a comp package alone. You get a rare zero-to-one seat in an AI-first venture studio built to launch multiple companies, not just maintain one. You get the intensity and authorship of early-stage building, with the structural advantages of a studio: stronger validation, shared resources, repeated shots on goal, and the chance to help build multiple high-impact ventures over time. Practically, that includes: Competitive salary Meaningful equity in every venture the studio builds 8 weeks of PTO Excellent health, vision, and dental insurance, with 99% of employee premiums paid 401(k) with 4% match Life insurance Paid parental leave Cell phone reimbursement Monthly parking stipend Weekly team lunches Dog-friendly office High-trust, high-autonomy culture The chance to work on multiple high-impact ventures each year Your own private office, and collaborative workspaces in one of the coolest office buildings in Tulsa The package matters. But for the right person, the bigger offer is where you get to place your next years. This is a full-time, in-person role built around real collaboration (with room for real life). This role is based in Tulsa . We’re open to exceptional candidates who would relocate for the right opportunity, but this is not a remote role. We want designers who want to build closely with the team in the room, in the work, and in the real decisions that shape what gets built. That being said, we are very flexible with real life. Some days you might need to work from home, for when the plumber shows up, step out for a kids' appointment, or just for a day of heads-down building. What we can’t flex on is the overall proximity and regular in-person presence that keeps the studio engine running fast. #J-18808-Ljbffr