Director, Product Design (AI Experience)

About the Role:

We’re hiring a design leader to own the experience of AlphaSense’s most important frontier: the AI-native, agentic product our customers use to build on proprietary financial data.

AlphaSense is shifting from a research library into an end-to-end workflow platform: a "super analyst" with agentic, computer-use capabilities that lets analysts go from question to discovery to synthesis to finished work product (dashboards, decks, models, generated outputs) without leaving the platform. It’s an enormous opportunity, and today the experience is fragmented: years of incremental features, two search paradigms that don’t yet converge, no self-service onboarding, and a wide spectrum of AI fluency across our users.

You will own the design vision for the AI experience and lead a small team to ship it. You’ll set a clear point of view on where the UX is going, collaborate with Product and Engineering while constructively challenging decisions to raise the bar, and turn an ambiguous, cross-team problem space into a coherent, high-quality, trustworthy product.

This is a player-coach role: like all of our directors, you’ll lead a small team of senior designers while staying hands-on with the craft. We’re open to hiring at Director or Senior Director, depending on scope and experience, with a preference for candidates located in NYC, in a similar time zone, or able to travel.

Why this role matters

At AlphaSense, design is a core driver of how we win. As we build an AI-native platform, the quality of our user experience will define how effectively customers can navigate complexity, build conviction, and make high-stakes financial decisions with confidence.

In this role, you will set that standard through the AI experience you shape, the team you grow, and the craft bar you hold across the product.

What You’ll Do:

• Set the UX direction for the core AI / agentic experience: a clear, opinionated vision for how analysts work with AI on high-stakes financial decisions, and a sequenced path from today’s product to that north star.
• Lead through influence and craft: partner with an SVP of Product and multiple PMs (across NY and the UK), advocating for the best experience while working through business goals, timelines, and technical constraints to decide the real first step.
• Solve the hard, data-dense UX problems: malleable UI with sensible defaults for hedge funds and banks (without overwhelming them), taming information overload, trust and transparency in AI-mediated workflows (citations, confidence, control, reversibility), and cohesion across surfaces.
• Stay hands-on: prototype in code and with real data, contribute directly to the highest-leverage surfaces, and set the craft bar by doing the work, not just reviewing it.
• Raise the bar for AI-native design: define how AI shows up as a first-party capability across the product, not just in one agentic pane.
• Help evolve our foundations: contribute to a design system being rebuilt to be code- and AI-readable.
• Coach, grow, and care for a small team of senior designers: modeling the craft, giving sharp feedback, and creating the conditions for them to own outcomes end-to-end.
• Hire and level thoughtfully as the team grows, keeping the org flat and the talent bar high.
• Multiply the team’s impact through operating mechanisms (UX audits, opportunity maps, product narratives, design reviews, and clear quality bars) rather than personal output alone.
• Communicate persuasively upward, including to VP/C-level, grounding proposals in customer evidence and business outcomes.

Who You Are:

• A senior product-design leader with 10+ years of relevant design experience at technical and product-driven companies (3+ years in people management preferred), and a track record of owning a major product area’s experience and shipping it, ideally in complex, data-dense, or expert-user domains.
• Strong, well-argued opinions held with humility: you shape direction and create healthy friction, and you update your view when the evidence changes.
• Genuine AI-native product judgment: not just content generation, but designing for trust, control, and workflow transformation in agentic and probabilistic systems.
• Hands-on craft and technical fluency: comfortable prototyping in code (React / modern front-end an advantage) and using AI tools in your workflow; credible to designers and engineers alike.
• People leadership: evidence you can model, coach, and care for a team, not only align stakeholders. (For candidates newer to formal management, we’ll look for strong player-coach signals and a real motivation to develop others.)
• Excellent communication and collaboration with both technical and non-technical partners, and comfort operating in ambiguity across teams.
• Curiosity about (or experience in) financial services, fintech, or other high-stakes professional domains. Domain expertise is a strong plus; a serious, humble approach to ramping into it is essential.