Head of Product Design (R5776)
Shield AI is hiring a Head of Product Design in San Diego to lead the user experience vision for Hivemind, its autonomy development platform. It's a hands-on leadership role: conducting user research, prototyping, designing AI-native and agent-driven workflows, and mentoring a small team of designers.
- Compensation
- $230K–$420K / yr
- Location
- San Diego, California
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Part time
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Design
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years of experience in Product Design, UX Design, Human Factors, or related fields
- Proven track record designing and shipping complex technical products, developer tools, platforms, infrastructure software, data-dense applications, or enterprise systems
- Deep technical fluency and ability to collaborate with senior engineering leaders on architecture, technical constraints, and software development workflows
- Strong experience conducting user research and translating insights into product strategy and design solutions
- Proven ability to influence product direction and organizational decisions without direct authority
- Strong understanding of AI-powered product experiences, including conversational interfaces, human-in-the-loop workflows, AI-assisted decision making, and agent-based systems
- Experience defining new user experiences in ambiguous technology spaces where industry standards are still emerging
- Experience building and retaining high-performing design teams
- Strong portfolio showcasing both strategic thinking and hands-on design execution
Nice to have
- Background designing developer platforms, SDKs, cloud infrastructure products, DevOps tooling, or engineering productivity tools
- Direct work on AI/ML platforms, MLOps workflows, foundation-model-enabled products, copilots, or agentic systems
- Familiarity with autonomy, robotics, simulation, digital twins, mission systems, physical AI, or related development workflows
- Portfolio examples involving command-and-control systems, mission-planning interfaces, operational dashboards, or real-time decision-support tools
- Ability to design across integrated hardware/software systems
- Domain exposure to defense technology, aerospace, robotics, or other regulated, mission-critical, high-consequence environments
Full description
Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit . Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube.
Job Description:
The Head of Product Design will define and lead the user experience vision for Hivemind, Shield AI’s autonomy development platform. This role is responsible for transforming complex autonomy, robotics, AI, and developer workflows into intuitive experiences that enable engineers, operators, and organizations to develop and deploy resilient autonomy at scale.
A major focus of this role will be shaping the next generation of AI-native and agent-driven workflows across the autonomy lifecycle. As Hivemind evolves from traditional software tooling toward AI-assisted autonomy development, simulation, evaluation, deployment, and operations, this leader will help invent entirely new ways for users to collaborate with AI systems, agents, and foundation-model-powered tools. The ideal candidate has deep experience designing AI products, developer platforms, or complex technical systems and can translate emerging AI capabilities into workflows that dramatically improve user productivity and outcomes.
This is a highly hands-on role as this leader will manage a team of elite designers. During the first 6–12 months, most of the time will be spent conducting user research, designing experiences, prototyping concepts, facilitating product discovery, and partnering directly with Product and Engineering teams to define the future of autonomy development.
What you'll do:
User Research & Product Discovery
- Lead customer research efforts across product development, customer engagement, and solutions teams to identify pain points, workflows, unmet needs, and product opportunities.
- Establish scalable mechanisms for gathering, synthesizing, and communicating user insights throughout the product development lifecycle.
- Translate customer and operational feedback into actionable product recommendations, requirements, and design initiatives.
Product Design & User Experience
- Design end-to-end workflows across autonomy development, simulation, testing, analysis, deployment, and operations.
- Create intuitive experiences for highly technical users including autonomy engineers, software developers, operators, and mission planners.
- Simplify complex system architectures, data flows, infrastructure tooling, and AI workflows into understandable user experiences.