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.
We're looking for a VP of Product Design to lead the organization that owns Algolia's Application Layer – the product surfaces where developers, merchandisers & business teams build, configure & optimize search & AI experiences – & Satellite, our design component library, the system that powers consistency & velocity across every Algolia product.
This role sits at the center of our two foundational bets – becoming the retrieval & intelligence layer for agentic AI while deepening our hybrid AI search moat – executed in parallel, not sequentially.
Three design challenges define the mandate:
- 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.
We need someone AI-native – a leader who designs with AI (AI-assisted design workflows, design-to-code pipelines), designs for AI (agentic, conversational & generative interfaces) & builds a design organization whose operating model assumes AI as a core collaborator – humans shifting into supervisory & judgment roles as execution is delegated to systems.
The Job
What You’ll Own:
- 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.
- 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.
What You’ll Bring:
- 15+ years in product design – 6+ leading design organizations (managers of managers) at B2B SaaS or developer-platform companies.
- Demonstrated AI-native design leadership – you've shipped AI/ML-powered product experiences – conversational, agentic, or generative – & have an articulated point of view on AI design patterns, backed by shipped work.
- Technical depth – comfort with front-end fundamentals (React, component architecture, design tokens), APIs & how LLM-based systems actually behave – latency, hallucination, non-determinism – & how those constraints shape interface decisions. You can review a PR conversation & hold your own in an architecture discussion.
- Proven ownership of a complex technical application experience – serving developer & business audiences.
- Hands-on experience building or scaling a design system with real cross-org adoption – as a product, with customers, a roadmap & governance.
- An AI-augmented personal practice – you use AI tools daily in your own workflow & have modernized how teams work, not just what they ship.
- Executive presence – you translate design impact into business terms with C-level peers.
- A record of growing teams & developing design leaders – not just artifacts shipped.
Nice to Haves:
- Experience in search – discovery, e-commerce, or data-intensive platforms.
- Background as a design engineer – UX engineer, or former developer.
- Published thinking (talks, writing) – AI design patterns or design systems.
Why This Role, Why Now
Algolia has built category-defining infrastructure; the next chapter is about turning that position into outcome-driven growth – & the application layer is where strategy becomes experience. You'll own the surfaces where thousands of companies direct intelligent systems that reach billions of end users & the design system that determines how fast the entire company ships. If you believe the next generation of great design leaders will be technical, AI-native & systems-minded – few roles offer a better place to prove it.
