Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Product Designer role stands out in SaaS because it sits at the platform layer of a mature communications product where AI is not positioned as a bolt-on. Dialpad’s long operating history and explicit investment in AI-enabled workflows signals a product environment with real usage volume and established surfaces, which tends to make design decisions about trust, transparency, and interaction models materially consequential across the suite.
From a SaaS career perspective, platform design work is durable leverage. Experience defining patterns, primitives, and design-system infrastructure translates across subscription products where multiple teams ship on shared foundations. The emphasis on production code and production-realistic prototypes also aligns with a broader SaaS trend toward designers who can reduce handoff friction, validate with real data, and influence how teams operationalize AI in day-to-day delivery.
This role is best suited to a senior designer who prefers system-level problems over isolated feature work, and who is comfortable collaborating closely with engineering and product leadership. It fits someone who enjoys setting standards, leaving reusable artifacts behind, and mentoring through concrete shipped work, especially in environments where AI changes both the product and the way teams build it.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Your role
You are a connector. You are a builder. You work at the edge of what's possible with AI and design. You restlessly push yourself to get better and lift your team along with you. If this describes you, then Dialpad is the place for you.
We're looking for a Staff Product Designer. This person will be a key design leader, sharpening how AI shows up in Dialpad, meeting our customers' needs, and driving how the team incorporates AI into their day-to-day work. This person will help build the future of business communications for humans—and AI. At Dialpad, we deeply understand both: we've been providing real-time communication services for almost 15 years and building AI solutions since 2018, having transcribed over 5 billion calls and meeting minutes.
The Design team sits at the forefront of what's next for Dialpad: we not only help explore the future of the Dialpad platform, but we were the first team at Dialpad to fully adopt AI into our work. We're reshaping how we work with AI and how AI shows up for our customers. We are a team of curious, technically grounded builders who care deeply about craft, exploring ideas, and building tools to help each other.
This role is a great fit for someone who's as comfortable working in a terminal window as they are in a Figma window, who treats AI as a medium to be designed in—not a feature to be tacked on, and who is restless about the design craft and how it's changing.
Portfolios must demonstrate impactful work consistently implemented at high-craft standards. Your portfolio must also show evidence of an AI-native design practice from within the last 6 months. We're not looking for AI savants; we're looking for designers who can fluently use these tools in their work. We're looking for designers who raise the bar around them — not just what they personally shipped.
What you'll do
- Lead design on the foundational layers and platform-wide initiatives that the rest of Dialpad's product is built on.
- Partner with design, product, and engineering leadership to set direction for the platform work that feature teams depend on.
- Define the patterns, primitives, and interaction models that other designers and teams build with — and make sure they hold up at scale.
- Ship production code alongside engineering — not just front-end polish, but meaningful contributions to the systems your work shapes.
- Build production-realistic coded prototypes with real data that engineers can take forward into platform work.
- Design AI-first capabilities and infrastructure where trust, transparency, and user control are first-class concerns.
- Build your own tooling — skills, agents, and micro-apps — and raise the team's AI practice through what you build, not what you tell them to do.
- Strengthen and evolve Dialtone, our design system, and leave reusable patterns behind for the designers building on top of your work.
- Identify cross-cutting problems and opportunities other designers aren't yet looking at.
- Mentor designers across the team, give feedback that holds the bar, and coach peers on craft, communication, and AI fluency.
- Improve how the team ships, communicates, and works together — adapting your altitude for your team, leadership, and the broader design org.
Skills you'll bring
- 8+ years of shipping high-quality product design work, with a track record of impact on platform-level or foundational design surfaces — design systems, infrastructure, AI capabilities, integrations, or the patterns and primitives that feature teams build on top of.
- Treated AI as a medium you design in, not a feature you add — and shaped how your previous team or organization practices AI in their daily work.
- Built your own AI tooling — skills, agents, micro-apps, CLI workflows — to accelerate your design and shipping practice, beyond chat-window prompting.
- Shipped code into production codebases and used coded prototypes as a primary thinking and validation tool — not a bonus deliverable.
- Designed patterns, components, or systems that other designers and engineers consumed at scale, and held them up under the weight of real adoption.
- Driven work end-to-end without waiting to be told what's next — you own outcomes, not just outputs.
- Pixel-level craft that's a given — you notice things others miss in your own work, in the system, and in adjacent work.
- Strong communication across audiences — comfortable adapting altitude for your team, your manager, the design organization, and cross-functional stakeholders in PM, engineering, and leadership.
- Mentored other designers and elevated the work of people around you — a generous collaborator, not a lone wolf.
- Navigate ambiguous, complex projects autonomously while keeping your team and manager in the loop with clear asynchronous updates.
- Think in systems — designing cohesive end-to-end experiences and identifying opportunities to reduce system debt that helps the team move faster in the future.
Extra-special if you…
- Have shipped AI-native products, agentic workflows, or conversational interfaces — and have strong opinions on what makes them good.
- Have built internal tooling, prototyping infrastructure, or developer-facing design systems that other designers or engineers actually adopted.
- Maintain a personal practice — side projects, open source contributions, writing, or experiments — where you push your own craft forward.
- Have experience in SaaS, communications, contact centers, or real-time collaboration platforms.
- Have helped evolve or scale a design system, including its tooling and adoption mechanics.
- Contribute to the broader design community through writing, speaking, open source, or mentoring.
