Product Designer

Location San Francisco, CA Employment Type Full time Location Type On-site Department Engineering Compensation $127K – $172K Everyone's talking about AI. But here's the truth: ChatGPT can't send your emails. It can't book your flights. It can't even order you lunch. Why? Because AI is trapped in a chat box. It can't take real actions in the real world. We are changing that forever. We're not just building another AI company; we're creating the infrastructure that will power every AI application you'll use in the future. The Revolution Needs You Every AI app needs agentic "tools" - special functions that let AI models take real actions. Without tools, AI can only chat. With tools, AI can actually do things. We're building the actions runtime that allows AI agents to safely take real-world actions at enterprise scale. As Arcade's first designer, you'll build the UX/UI function from scratch. You start with the Dashboard — the surface where customers decide whether to trust their agents with real systems. From there, you shape whatever comes next: MCP Apps, and the surfaces nobody has named yet. Why This Is The Opportunity of a Lifetime Founder-Market Fit : Our CEO previously founded Stormpath (acquired by Okta), where he created the first Authentication API for developers. He's done this before, and this time the market is 10x bigger. Our CTO led the vector database team at Redis, shipped 100+ LLM applications, and is a contributor to LangChain and LlamaIndex. He knows this space better than anyone. Dream Team : We've assembled authentication, integrations, distributed systems, and AI experts from Okta, Redis, Microsoft, Splunk, ngrok, Google, Airbyte, Disney, and HPE who've built and founded multiple successful developer platforms. Perfect Timing : We're at the inflection point of AI adoption. The biggest problem isn't better models, it's connecting AI to real-world actions. That's us. Massive Market : We're building critical infrastructure for the biggest technological shift of our generation. Every AI app will need what we're building. Backed By The Best: Our investors have backed Databricks, Clickhouse, MongoDB, Perplexity, Cohere, ScaleAI, Confluent, Elastic, and Firebase. They see what we see — this is going to be huge. The Challenge Product Design's charter at Arcade is simple and hard: every surface where customers meet Arcade is a trust surface. For most of our customers — the AI/ML architects deploying Arcade inside their companies — the Dashboard is the only place they see us today, which is why it's where you start. Every fear they have about giving agents access to real systems either gets settled or amplified here. The work of design is to make sure it's the former. This is a new design space. Agents are non-deterministic. Tools fire in patterns customers didn't predict. Auth scopes nest in ways that aren't obvious. The Dashboard has to make all of that legible — for an admin granting an agent permission, an engineer debugging a failed tool call at 11pm, a compliance reviewer asking "what did the agent actually do?" Three different mental models, one product surface. There is no playbook for this. Nobody has shipped a definitive answer for how to design an admin UI for agents — the conventions we adopt will likely become the ones other companies copy. Some of your work is design. Some is teaching, explaining concepts customers haven't fully internalized yet, inside the product itself. If you'd rather inherit a design language than help invent one, this isn't the right role. And you're not just designing — you're building a function. There's no design team yet. There's no design language you inherit (engineering has stood up Radix and Tailwind patterns, but those are a starting point, not a system). You'll define how design works with engineering, how it works with the PM, and how it shows up in Marketing. Every pattern you set becomes the one the next designer inherits. This role reports to the Engineering Manager for Tools and Growth. The team is small, and you'll work across the entire company — shoulder-to-shoulder with engineering on the Dashboard, with the PM on Tools and Growth on what surfaces matter most, and with Marketing on how design decisions show up beyond the product. Your decisions land in customers' hands within weeks, not quarters. If you want to do the design work nobody has done yet — and watch customers learn from it — this is the role. What You'll Do Own the design of major Dashboard surfaces end-to-end — flow, interaction, visual — from first sketch to shipped pixels. Run customer research with the AI/ML architects deploying Arcade. Interview them. Watch them use prototypes. Bring the signal back to the team. Pair daily with engineering. Hand off in Figma, watch implementation in our React + Tailwind codebase, and iterate when production reveals something the mock didn't. Shape the design system alongside engineering. We use Radix and Tailwind today; what we ship next either reuses, extends, or replaces those patterns deliberately. Make agent state legible — tool execution, auth scopes, observability, billing. All of it has to feel obvious in the moment a customer needs the answer. Write the design rationale. Explain decisions so engineers, the PM, and Marketing can build on them — and so customers learn the model from the product itself. Set the bar for design quality as Arcade grows. Your patterns get inherited by every designer after you. Required Skills 3–5 years of product design experience, with at least one role focused on a developer-facing or B2B SaaS product. Formal title matters less than the work. A portfolio that shows end-to-end product work — research → flows → interaction → visual → shipped pixels, not just static screens. Strong fluency in Figma. Fast, organized, components and tokens you'd actually want to inherit. Comfort with technical product spaces. You can read enough about APIs, auth, and agent behavior to design for them — and you ask the right questions when you can't. Demonstrated ability to run customer research without a dedicated researcher. You've talked to real users, synthesized what you heard, and changed the design because of it. Strong partnership with engineering. You've shipped real product alongside engineers and made the work better for it. Opinions on design systems — not just visual consistency, but how tokens, components, and patterns hold up as a team scales. Comfort with ambiguity — early team, narrow charter that will expand. You make good decisions with incomplete data. An insatiable desire to ship. Bonus Points You've designed for AI, ML, or agent products before — and have opinions about what makes them work. Prior experience at a developer-tools, API-platform, or infrastructure company (Stripe, Vercel, Supabase, Auth0, Postman, Linear, and the like). You've shipped or substantially contributed to a design system that survived contact with multiple engineers. Comfort designing for engineers as your primary user — you understand what makes an admin UI feel right to someone who'd rather be in their terminal. Prototyping in code, even at a basic level. A designer who can read React and prototype interactions in the actual codebase moves faster than one who can't. Join The Movement We're not just building a product; we're leading a movement to transform AI from just chatbots to agents that can take actions against real systems. This is your chance to be at the forefront of that revolution. If you want to look back in 5 years and say, "I helped build that", then we want to talk to you. Ready to make AI actually useful? Apply Now Compensation and Benefits This role offers a competitive salary, equity, and benefits. Compensation is aligned with the range below and determined based on a candidate's background, experience, and performance. Salary Range $127,000-$172,000 USD Notes: This is an in-person role located in our San Francisco (SOMA) office. #J-18808-Ljbffr