Senior AI Product Designer

Compensation: $180k–$200k base salary range based on level and experience, plus a generous pre‑IPO equity package About Hearth Hearth is the AI growth system for local home improvement small businesses. We build revenue‑critical software for home improvement contractors — the roofers, HVAC techs, and builders who keep America running. Our platform helps real business owners win more jobs, protect profit margins, and manage homeowner relationships professionally so they can build generational companies for their families and communities. We are now building the next layer: a personal AI employee for every small business in the trades focused on autonomously generating sales for America’s home improvement pros. An assistant who answers every call 24/7, qualifies leads, books appointments, follows up on quotes and estimates, and helps small business owners go from missing half of their business to capturing all of it. With 15,000+ paying customers, default profitability, and backing from some of the world’s best investors (Founder’s Fund, 8VC, Human Capital, etc.), Hearth is focused on bringing AI to the trades. The Opportunity We are searching for the right Senior Product Designer who will help bring AI to the trades. You will own how millions of small business contractors and homeowners experience Harper‑Hearth’s AI digital employee. This is a high‑impact role that defines how a massive, underserved industry experiences AI for the first time. You will run rapid validation and user testing with real contractors, design and ship experiences that inflect the growth rate of the business, and ultimately translate powerful technology into experiences so intuitive that a roofer in 100°F heat can use them between jobs in under five minutes. The right person for this role is a true builder – someone who is high agency, high urgency, and wants to have a meaningful impact. You are a true partner to engineers, accelerating time to ship and injecting the voice of the customer to unblock the team. You spend a quarter of your time with customers, and the rest of your time turning what you learn into experiments that drive commercial impact. What You’ll Do: Harper AI experience end-to-end. Onboarding and activation flows, the Message Center / Stream UI, intent previewing and editing, and every AI‑powered touchpoint across web, mobile, and messaging…all designed to drive real commercial outcomes in a simple, intuitive way. User research operations. Run weekly rapid interviews with contractors, test prototypes in the field, and synthesize qualitative signals into product decisions the entire team can act on. You’ll spend 25%+ of your time with customers. AI design system and interaction patterns. Build and maintain production‑grade components for AI interfaces that reduce engineering ambiguity and accelerate the team. Cross‑functional translation. Turn product outcomes into acceptance criteria, engineering tickets with required instrumentation events. You’re the connective tissue between product, engineering, and the customer. Experimentation engine. Draft hypotheses, define success metrics, ship lightweight A/B and feature experiments, analyze impact, and iterate in days, not months. You own the full cycle from insight to shipped experiment to measured result. Your First 90 Days: Weeks 1–2: Audit the Harper UX end-to-end — onboarding funnel, Message Center, product demos. Deliver a prioritized list of 3 experiments with hypotheses, target metrics, and required engineering effort. Month 1: Ship your first high‑impact A/B or feature experiment with a measurement plan. Get in front of customers and deliver a customer insight that directly informs the roadmap. Month 2: Scale experimentation cadence. Work closely with engineers and leadership to deliver on the product roadmap. Begin mapping the AI design system and deliver multiple explorations for team review. Month 3: Stabilize the experimentation engine, formalize the design system, and establish the research and measurement rituals that will compound from here. Who You Are: Taste & Impact. 3–7+ years of product design with a strong UX practice. You’ve shipped real products, run experiments, and can point to measurable business impact from your work. You have experience successfully building for non‑technical customers. AI‑first. You have experience designing AI, conversational, or voice interfaces — and you’re spending your nights and weekends pushing the frontier of what’s possible with AI tools for design. Data fluent. You can read Amplitude dashboards, define success metrics for experiments, and use quantitative results to make design decisions. You don’t design without a hypothesis. Builder velocity. You move from problem to solution to shipped experiment in days, not sprints. Rapid prototyping is second nature. You produce ship‑ready components in under a day and can explain every tradeoff you made. Customer obsessed. You genuinely want to understand contractors — their days, their frustrations, their workflows. You’re energized by field research, not intimidated by it. You have the empathy to design for non‑technical blue‑collar users and the humility to let their reality override your assumptions. Systems thinker. You design consistent, scalable patterns across mobile, web, and messaging surfaces. You bridge product and engineering tradeoffs instead of creating engineering miracles. Communicator. You express ideas crisply. You run cross‑functional workshops and produce artifacts that engineering, sales, and leadership actually use. What We’re Looking For: Background in SMB, blue‑collar, or trades‑adjacent product design Familiarity with mobile‑first design for field workers and on‑the‑go use cases History of building and scaling design systems from scratch Experience with Twilio, messaging platforms, or real‑time communication products What We’re Not Looking For: You’re not AI‑first — you’re not spending every extra hour experimenting with the latest AI tools for design You lack “designer‑market fit” - you are unable to spend 30% of your time with blue‑collar contractors and “get” them You design without quantification - no hypothesis, no metric, no plan to measure impact You hide behind “we need more research” to avoid shipping — your research should be rapid and outcome‑oriented You need heavy management, detailed briefs, and structured processes to be productive You measure success through deliverables completed rather than customer outcomes moved You’re looking for a “chill” role rather than an opportunity to define how an entire industry experiences AI Why This Role: Define how an industry meets AI. You’ll be defining how millions of contractors and homeowners experience AI for the first time. Harper is early, the canvas is wide open, and the decisions you make in the first 90 days will shape the product for years. This is a rare chance to do foundational design work on a product with real customers and real revenue. Real impact on real people. Our customers are business owners building real things. When your design works, a contractor in Phoenix closes a job he would have missed. A roofer in Texas stops losing 40% of inbound calls because Harper caught them while he was on a job site. A fence pro in Delaware gets to come home for dinner with his family instead of returning calls until 9pm. The feedback loop between your design and someone’s livelihood is short and tangible. A real business with serious traction and massive upside. Hearth is growing, profitable, and already has 15,000+ customers. This isn’t a proof of concept — this is an opportunity to build the most ambitious version of a product that powers a trillion‑dollar market. You would be shaping the customer experience that drives that transformation — early enough for meaningful equity and late enough for strong foundations. Our Core Values Truth. We value honesty and data. We seek to understand what is reality, so we can effectively respond to it. Slope. Rate of change over time. We hire and reward based on a team member’s potential, capacity, and growth‑mindset, rather than a fancy resume. Mutual Benefit. The best outcomes happen when everyone wins - customers, team members, and the company. We seek to understand each other’s aspirations and create alignment to get there. Competitive Greatness. We desire an opportunity and environment from which to pull the greatest versions of ourselves out into the world, rather than just a “job”. Location This role will be located in NYC along with the rest of the technical Hearth team, the CEO, and other key roles in the business. Hearth believes in the energy, connection, and serendipity of in‑person/hybrid work culture (3+ days/week) for builders who are committed to building truly innovative software and making a significant positive impact in the world. Mission‑driven, values‑based culture. Competitive pay. Unmatched opportunities to learn and develop; front‑row seat at a fast‑growing tech startup Stock options. Medical, dental, and vision options. 401(k) Free Employee Assistance Program Parental Leave Program Pet Insurance More About Us Hearth embraces diversity. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, citizenship, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We consider employment for qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. The pay range for this role is: 180,000 - 200,000 USD per year (New York) #J-18808-Ljbffr