The opportunity
As AI agents increasingly search, synthesize & act on behalf of users – the traditional search interface becomes optional – or disappears entirely. That makes the interfaces that remain matter more, not less – the surfaces where humans direct, constrain, trust & supervise intelligent systems.
What you'll do
Automation with control. Our customers demand deterministic control: an AI system that can't explain why Product A outranks Product B creates immediate friction. You'll close the gap between the promise of AI ease-of-use & the lived experience of customers – designing interfaces where business users set goals & constraints that guide AI behavior, with transparency & explainability built in.
Simplicity as a moat. Algolia's developer advantage is only as strong as its: relative simplicity. As platform capability grows – our abstractions must improve faster than our complexity. The application layer is where that battle is won or lost.
Time-to-first-intelligence. Bottom-up adoption is non-negotiable. You'll own: the product-led experience that lets a builder go from signup to a working, intelligent experience in minutes – re-earning developer affinity with each new generation of builders.
Product design vision & strategy for the entire application experience: developer onboarding through enterprise-grade agent orchestration – tied to measurable customer outcomes: adoption, performance & impact in production.
AI design standards for the company: interaction patterns for agentic UX – trust & transparency, human-in-the-loop controls, streaming & non-deterministic states, explainability of relevance & ranking, graceful failure of probabilistic systems.
Satellite Design System, run as a product: roadmap, governance, contribution model, adoption metrics, accessibility – & its evolution into an AI-native system with primitives for conversational & agentic interfaces that both humans & AI coding tools can consume.
What they're looking for
- A technical product design org: product designers, design engineers, UX researchers, content designers – including hiring, coaching & developing design leadership.
- The quality bar: nothing reaches the market unless it meets or exceeds the usability & performance standards of core search.
- Executive partnership with Product, Engineering & GTM: representing design at the leadership table.
- + years in product design: 6+ leading design organizations (managers of managers) at B2B SaaS or developer-platform companies.
