Head of Product Design, Altana

• You think in systems, not screens. You don't just want to design great surfaces — you want to design the system that produces great surfaces at scale, in the hands of people who don't have "designer" in their title. You see the design system as your team's highest-leverage product and you have built one that was actually used as such
• You're agent-native, not AI-curious. You actively use AI tools to do your own work — to research, prototype, generate variants, critique, and ship. You have opinions about what agent-native UX looks like, formed by building it, not by reading about it. You're not waiting for "the AI design wave" — you've been on it for a while, and you have the receipts
• You're a product thinker as much as a design thinker. You can sit in a strategy session and make a credible case for what to build and why, not only how. You understand business and network metrics, can read a usage funnel, and hold yourself accountable to outcomes — activation, adoption, retention, expansion — not just to craft and aesthetics
• You design for many users at once. You're comfortable optimizing a single design system across radically different personas — enterprise compliance officers, government regulators, brokers, suppliers, agents — who all collaborate inside the same network experience. You know how to keep an experience coherent without flattening the differences between the people using it
• You're a builder, not just a leader. You can still prototype. You still review the work. You still write the principles. You build leverage for your team by raising the floor of the design system, not by becoming a bottleneck above it
• You're technically fluent. You don't need to ship production code, but you're comfortable in the materials of the modern web: CSS, React, design tokens, component APIs, accessibility primitives, and the AI tools that increasingly sit between a design intent and a shipped pixel. You can have a real conversation with engineering about how the system is implemented, not just how it looks
• You communicate with clarity and conviction. You can present design strategy to a CEO, a customer, a board, a prospective hire, and a junior designer — and each of them walks away aligned. You write as well as you draw
• You're energized by hard problems and high stakes. Altana's design surface — a multi-product, multi-persona, agent-native network that mediates real-world global trade — is one of the more interesting design challenges in enterprise software today. You see that as a feature, not a bug

Desirable

• Define what an agent-first design team looks like in practice — how it's structured, what it ships, what it measures, and how it scales with leverage rather than headcount
• Hire, develop, and lead a team of designers who treat AI as a teammate and a medium: who prototype in code with AI assistance, who design with agents rather than around them, and who see the design system as the team's highest-leverage product
• Establish the rituals, review forums, and quality bars that keep a small team of designers accountable for the experience of a multi-product, multi-persona network — without becoming the bottleneck that slows it down
• Champion a culture of "show, don't tell": working prototypes, agent-generated variants, and live demos beat decks and static comps every time
• Make the Design System the Product
• Own the vision for Altana's design system as the enablement layer for a new class of creators — product managers, engineers, and AI agents — who increasingly build user-facing experiences directly
• Define the system as more than a component library: a structured set of patterns, tokens, content rules, interaction grammars, and accessibility guarantees that are semantic, composable, and legible to AI — so that an LLM generating a workflow, a PM prototyping a new view, or an engineer wiring up a feature all converge on the same coherent experience
• Build the contribution model, the documentation, and the tooling (including AI-native authoring and review tools) that make the design system the fastest, easiest, and highest-quality path to ship — not a checklist people work around
• Measure the design system by leverage: how many net-new experiences shipped without direct designer involvement still meet the bar; how fast new patterns propagate; how much rework the system prevents
• Design Agent-Native In-Product Experiences
• Evolve Altana's in-product experience from a set of human-only workflows to genuinely agent-native workflows — where agents act, explain, ask, and hand off to humans, and humans confirm, correct, escalate, and delegate back
• Define the visual and interaction language for the new primitives this requires: agent reasoning surfaces, provenance and citation patterns, confidence and uncertainty signals, interruption and consent moments, multi-step task previews, human-in-the-loop review queues, and the affordances that let a user trust — or appropriately distrust — what an agent has done on their behalf
• Partner with product and engineering to make agentic capability discoverable inside the existing product, not hidden behind a separate "AI" tab — so that the right capability shows up at the right step of the workflow, for the right persona
• Treat every agent surface as a first-class design problem: what it looks like when it's working, what it looks like when it's wrong, and how a user moves between agent-mediated and direct-manipulation modes without losing their place
• Design Across a Multi-Product, Multi-Persona Network
• Own the end-to-end design strategy for a product suite that spans enterprise supply chain mapping, customs and entry management, PLM/ERP integration, government and regulatory tooling, logistics provider workflows, and financial services use cases — all converging on a single network experience
• Design for personas that share objects but not mental models: a corporate trade compliance officer, a licensed customs broker, a CBP officer, a logistics dispatcher, a supplier in a developing market, and an AI agent acting for any of them — collaborating around the same Product Passport, the same shipment, the same risk signal
• Build a design system that is opinionated about coherence but flexible about persona — one navigation, one visual language, one set of patterns — modulated by role, surface, and use case rather than forked into product-specific silos
• Make collaboration a first-class design surface: shared workspaces, handoffs across organizations, comments and approvals that cross enterprise/broker/government boundaries, and the trust and access patterns that make those interactions safe
• Lead as a Product Thinker, Not Just a Design Thinker
• Operate as a peer to Product, Engineering, and Data Science leadership: shape strategy, make trade-offs, own outcomes against business and network metrics — not just craft and aesthetics
• Tie design investment directly to the metrics that matter for a network business: activation, time-to-value, workflow completion, multi-party adoption, network k-factor, and product-led expansion across personas and organizations
• Lead customer research and discovery as a strategic capability — not a service function — and use what you learn to influence what gets built, not just how it looks
• Translate design vision into a clear, compelling narrative that aligns the executive team, the board, customers, and prospective hires around why design is a competitive moat for Altana
• Partner Across the Company
• Partner deeply with Engineering on the design-to-code pipeline: shared primitives, AI-assisted generation, automated accessibility and visual regression, and a contribution model where front-end engineers extend the system as a matter of course
• Partner with Product on roadmap and discovery — designing in the open with prototypes, not gating it behind handoff rituals
• Partner with Customer Experience, Marketing, and Sales to ensure that the product experience, the documentation that AI agents consume, and the way Altana communicates change all speak in one coherent voice