Senior Conversation Designer

Senior Conversation Designer We're seeking an experienced Senior Conversation Designer to join our team building and iterating on our generative AI voice system. This role requires both a designer and builder mindset to advance our product, and you'll have the opportunity to craft exceptional conversational experiences that feel natural, intuitive, and helpful to our users, across both voice and chat. Day to day, you're digging into conversation transcripts and metrics to find where real users are hitting friction, evaluating how models perform in production, and partnering closely with engineers to define prompts and guardrails for genAI. You're as comfortable creating a consistent voice, tone, and personality as you are debugging a fallback path or pushing prompt changes into Github. You'll report to our Head of Product, and partner with the Lead Conversation Designer to apply and contribute to design standards and processes. Beyond design, you'll collaborate with product, engineering, and operations to align conversation design with broader product strategy. You'll also drive research and testing across a range of methodologies — user research, usability testing, A/B testing, QA, and regression testing — to keep improving the experience. The role is based in our NYC HQ, with occasional travel for company offsites. (Note: Conversation Design is called different things at different companies; even if your past titles don't match, we're looking for someone who can design AI and its underlying logic and training.) Why You Belong Here and How You Will Grow Slang's conversation design practice pushes for highest-in-industry standards, valuing both user-centered thinking and technical fluency. Our conversation designers are embedded in the engineering team, hold vision for the overall product implementation, and advise engineers on what to build. You'll fit in here if you can obsess about building the right logic, advise on agent memory and state-based best practices, and use data to drive decisions that improve people's experiences across interfaces. You'll thrive here if you are enthusiastic about shaping how conversation design gets done at Slang — the standards, the patterns, the reusable building blocks other designers build on. You'll grow technically by going deeper into LLM integration and prompt engineering alongside engineers who take that work seriously, and you'll contribute to maturing design practice with real standards and processes behind it What Success Looks Like You will... Design end-to-end conversational flows for generative AI capabilities, for both voice and chat that incorporate condition logic, parameter handling, and tool calls Build robust error handling and fallback mechanisms for conversation recovery Create and test dialog that maintains a consistent voice, tone, and personality across the product Partner with engineers to define prompts and guardrails for LLM integration, and evaluate LLM performance in production Analyze conversation transcripts, audio, and metrics to identify friction points and turn them into concrete design improvements Define and document conversation design standards, best practices, and reusable patterns that scale across experiences What You Will Bring Required: 7+ years of experience designing conversational interfaces (voice assistants, IVR systems, any kind of voice AI) Demonstrated expertise with both traditional NLU frameworks and generative AI/LLM technologies Experience contributing to design standards and following established processes Experience with evaluating genAI agents and metrics-driven design Proven ability to design and build technically complex flows with multiple logical branches Experience with parameter extraction, validation logic, and dynamic response generation Strong understanding of programming concepts like variables, loops, and conditional statements Proficiency implementing conversation flows that integrate with external systems via APIs Proficiency with conversation design tools and prototyping platforms Excellent written and verbal communication skills with an ear for natural language Active, hands-on use of AI tools in your daily workflow — not passive awareness, but a demonstrated habit of using AI to move faster and think better Preferred: Strong understanding of linguistics, conversation analysis, and pragmatics Experience with evaluation and analytics tools for conversation performance measurement Understanding of accessibility considerations in voice and text interface design Experience in the restaurant or hospitality industry Familiarity with prompt engineering for large language models Background in content design, strategy, or UX/UI design Fluency in Spanish or French How Work Affects My Life As the senior conversation designer on a team that takes this craft seriously, you'll own meaningful design work end-to-end with real impact on how thousands of interactions land. Compensation & Location Compensation for this role is location-based and benchmarked against local market data aligned to the employee's primary work location. Total compensation includes a mix of cash and equity and may vary by location, role level, and experience. Our range is therefore wide and not meant as a negotiation range. Work Location: NYC HQ, Hybrid 3 days in office Base Compensation: $160,000 - $180,000 Equity: Included in offer package Our Vision Calling a business shouldn't feel like a robot-hostage situation, where you're forced to listen to horrible music and can't reach a human, while enduring a soulless voice uttering "I'm sorry I didn't quite get that" on repeat for eternity. (shudder) That's why we started Slang AI We use the latest AI and audio wizardry to make transacting via voice so enjoyable it's more human than human. By 2030, we will save businesses and consumers 1 billion minutes of precious time while transforming voice channels into the preferred mode of communication (it's faster and easier than text). We have backgrounds building product at companies like Spotify, Buzzfeed, the New York Times, and OpenTable —shipping experiences that have reached hundreds of millions of users. Now, we're using our backgrounds to start a new culture, one that puts product and human-centered design above all else while fostering constant learning and growth. Sound like something you'd like to be part of? Get on board. Our Values Overachiever Fever. We're overachievers (we don't know any other way) AI Native. We don't just sell AI. We are Al. Humility Ability. We approach each other with curiosity and openness (know-it-alls not welcome!) Be A Good Host. We build for hospitality. We should embody it. About Slang AI Slang AI is redefining customer engagement through conversational AI, making every interaction seamless and efficient. Our mission is to transform the restaurant industry by providing the ultimate voice AI solution for consistently outstanding customer experiences. At Slang AI, we believe how we build matters just as much as what we build. We foster a culture rooted in hospitality, ownership, and clarity, where every "Slangsta" feels valued, supported, and connected to the broader impact of our work in the AI-powered future of restaurants. Slang