Staff Product Designer

Staff Product Designer

Black Airplane is a digital product agency. We design and build software for a wide range of organizations — consumer apps, business systems, and the infrastructure that connects them. Every engagement is its own shape: different clients, different problems, different stakes. We're built to move fast, with room to test new approaches and real investment in the people doing the work.

We're hiring a Staff Product Designer to lead client engagements of every shape, raise the ceiling of our design practice (lifting the people working alongside you), and help us prove out the next generation of AI-enhanced design workflows. You'll lead the work end-to-end, mentor the team, drive our AI practice forward, and have a voice in pre-sales discovery.

Who We're Looking For

• A design leader with a portfolio of shipped products and design systems across web and mobile.
• A clear systems thinker. You turn an ambiguous problem into the right problem, then into a plan — and you can argue both sides of a tradeoff and still take a position. You can carry a complex engagement alone, but you design so the team, and the engineer who builds it, can pick it up.
• A builder who moves with autonomy. You'd rather ship the first version Friday than spend the week perfecting the brief. You also know the work is collaborative — designers, engineers, and clients all weighing in.
• A strategic partner to clients and to the team. You translate business goals into product direction without losing either side.
• An AI-fluent practitioner who has already changed how you work and can show the difference. You use AI to get something real in front of clients faster, not as a novelty.
• A team multiplier. Your standard for your own work raises the bar for everyone around you.

What You'll Own

• Lead complex client engagements end-to-end — discovery, strategy, IA, design, prototype, handoff. Anticipate the issues that derail design teams late in a project, and resolve them early.
• Push our AI practice forward. Run experiments, share what's working, retire what isn't, and help move us toward an AI-native design team.
• Build durable design systems within complex engagements: tokens, components, documentation, and the conventions that hold them together.
• Participate in pre-sales. You'll have a voice in how we scope new work. Estimate complex engagements with confidence, surface design and technical risks early, and shape proposals we can actually deliver.
• Mentor the designers around you. Set the bar on craft. Help the team adopt new tools and new ways of working.
• Speak up. Surface the broken process before someone else has to. Bring solutions, not just problems.

AI In Our Design Practice

We're not interested in "AI-enhanced design" as a buzzword. We're interested in what AI lets a designer actually do that wasn't possible a year ago — and in the first principles and practices that don't change when the tools do.

In practice, that currently looks like getting a clickable, branded prototype in front of a client quickly — something they can interact with, not just flat comps — so they can validate that the functionality actually works. Compressing the gap between an idea and a working demo from weeks to days. Pairing with engineering earlier, because the design is already in code.

What we're not looking for: designers who hand a prompt to an agent and call the output a design. The judgment, the taste, the systems thinking, the client instinct — those still come from you. AI is leverage for that judgment, not a substitute for it. It changes how we get to a high-quality product; it doesn't change the bar.

At Staff level, we expect you to have your own point of view on how AI changes design work, the receipts to back it up, and the willingness to bring the rest of the team along.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years in product design, at the complexity you'd be expected to lead at Black Airplane. Formal degree optional — we hire on the work.
• Expert Figma — design systems, tokens, prototyping, engineering handoff. Comfortable working close to code.
• Real, demonstrable use of AI tooling in your design process: prototyping in code (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or similar), AI-assisted ideation and research, and a working point of view on what to use when.
• Excellent communication — written, verbal, and in front of clients. You can present and defend your work, and keep the conversation productive when a client pushes back.
• Accurate estimation on complex projects. Pre-sales experience is a plus.

This is a full-time, remote position (US only). Compensation: $108,000–$131,000.

Black Airplane is a remote-friendly environment. Work location is flexible if approved by Black Airplane, except that the position may not be performed remotely from AK, CA, HI, MA, NY, OR, PA, WA, or outside of the United States.