Principal Product Designer

About this role

<h3>About <a href="http://Customer.io">Customer.io</a></h3> <p>Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. <a href="http://Customer.io">Customer.io</a> powers automated communication that people actually want to receive. We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data.</p> <h3>About the role</h3> <p>Hi, my name is Matt W, VP of Product &amp; Design at <a href="http://Customer.io">Customer.io</a>, and I'm looking for a Principal Product Designer. Principal Product Designer is the highest individual contributor design role at <a href="http://Customer.io">Customer.io</a>. This person shapes the design vision for the company and influences how design is practiced here — through their own craft, through the standards their work sets, and through the partnerships they build with product and engineering leadership.</p> <p><a href="http://Customer.io">Customer.io</a> is in a transformational moment: executing against a strong current product while redesigning what the product is and how it's experienced by a new generation of builders. This role has to straddle both — delivering quality and coherence in what exists today while driving the vision for where things go.</p> <p>This is not a management role, but it's a leadership role in the fullest sense. Their influence is felt company-wide — in the product, in the culture, and in who we hire.</p> <h3>About you</h3> <p>You have a fully formed point of view on how AI changes what software means — for the people who use it, the people who build it, and the agents that increasingly operate it. You have the conviction to put that view to work across a product and an organization. You lead through clarity and example, give candid feedback that improves the work, and operate with humility and curiosity even outside your own expertise.</p> <h3>What we value</h3> <ul> <li><strong>Leads through clarity and example, not control.</strong> You shape culture through your own practice — not top-down direction.</li> <li><strong>Candid craft feedback.</strong> You give feedback that improves the work, even when it's uncomfortable.</li> <li><strong>Humility and curiosity.</strong> You operate with openness, especially in areas outside your expertise.</li> <li><strong>Amplifying others.</strong> You raise the impact of people across the whole company — not just the design team.</li> <li><strong>Bias for craft.</strong> You stay close to the work by choice, and that proximity is how you lead.</li> </ul> <h3>Some things you'll do</h3> <ul> <li><strong>Shape and communicate a design vision for <a href="http://Customer.io">Customer.io</a>'s product as a whole</strong> — the coherent, long-range picture of what excellent looks like for our customers, brought into rooms where product direction gets set</li> <li><strong>Drive the strategic direction of Pluma</strong>, our design system — architecture, evolution, deprecation decisions, and the principles that govern how it scales</li> <li><strong>Close the gap between design intent and shipped product</strong> — stay close enough to implementation to catch divergence, and fix it directly when code is the right tool</li> <li><strong>Design for builder and developer audiences</strong> — CLI-native flows, API-first onboarding, and interfaces built for people who type before they click</li> <li><strong>Lead the design of agentic and human-AI surfaces</strong> across the product — develop the philosophy and advocate for the standards</li> <li><strong>Partner with product and engineering leadership on product strategy</strong> — bring design into the conversation before direction is set, not after</li> <li><strong>Develop and advocate for <a href="http://Customer.io">Customer.io</a>'s AI product design philosophy</strong> as a framework the whole team builds from</li> <li><strong>Lead design review for major initiatives</strong> and bring accountability for quality and coherence across what ships</li> <li><strong>Develop Staff designers</strong> through direct mentorship, critique, and the clarity of your own example</li> <li><strong>Contribute to hiring and calibration</strong> — assess candidates with conviction and help the team develop a shared language for what excellent looks like</li> </ul> <h3>What we're looking for</h3> <ul> <li><strong>10+ years of product design experience</strong> with a portfolio demonstrating design vision and organizational impact, not just individual craft</li> <li>Track record of <strong>shaping design direction at the company level</strong> — influenced what gets built and why, not just how it looks</li> <li><strong>Designed for developer and builder audiences</strong> — CLI, API-first onboarding, or infrastructure-native products</li> <li><strong>Developed point of view on AI and agentic product design</strong> — has shipped AI-native interfaces and can articulate a philosophy on interaction models for agentic and delegated use</li> <li><strong>Contributed to a design system at the strategic level</strong> — shaped what it should be and shouldn't be, and advocated for those decisions over time</li> <li><strong>Operates with influence without authority</strong> — track record of aligning product, engineering, and exec leadership around a design direction without a management title</li> <li><strong>Has raised the craft bar at an organizational level</strong> — through critique culture, standards, and the example others internalize</li> <li><strong>Executive-level communication</strong> — connects design decisions to customer impact, product differentiation, and business outcomes</li> <li><strong>B2B SaaS depth</strong> — understands complex, data-heavy products and has opinions about where the interaction model breaks</li> </ul> <h3>Compensation &amp; Benefits</h3> <p>We believe in transparency. The starting salary for this role is <strong>$24