Product Designer

Doing product research online feels harder than ever. AI promised better information. Instead it flooded the web with hallucinations, generated content, and confident-sounding answers that have no idea what's true.
Product.ai is building the truth engine for shopping. When every other AI tool summarizes and guesses, we verify. Not opinions. Not averages. Ground truth.
Self-funded and profitable for over a decade, we're a team of e-commerce veterans who have been building commerce truth systems at scale. Over a billion dollars in annual transaction volume. Millions of customers served. Product.ai is our flagship - the new starting point for shopping in the AI era. We're in early alpha, building alongside our community of domain experts.
We are seeking a Product Designer to ship consumer experiences for an AI-native commerce platform. Nobody has designed what a confident "No" looks like in a shopping interface, or the experience of watching an AI agent verify a product claim in real time. You're building new surfaces from first principles. Your prototype skills matter more than your polish skills, and your judgment about what users need matters more than what stakeholders want.
Based in Santa Monica. Hybrid schedule with flexibility. For the right builder, we're open to remote.
What You Will Build

• Design Bridge. Our designs live in two worlds: our web app (human-facing) and our agent-native surfaces (JSON-LD, MCP protocol - machine-facing). Same UX logic, different substrates. You'll translate designs across these worlds without losing fidelity. When an AI agent consumes our verification data via API, the information architecture you designed still needs to work. This is a new design problem. You won't find it in any portfolio school.
• AI-Native Pipeline. You'll prototype with AI as a tool, not a constraint. Figma + AI generation for rapid iteration. Code prototyping for interaction validation. You'll ship 3-5 design iterations in the time a traditional designer ships one, because you use AI to handle the mechanical parts so you can focus on the judgment calls.
• Consumer Product Experience. The core web experience (smartphones first) with our AI shopping agent at its heart. You'll design how verification signals translate to visual language - how state changes feel, how users navigate between hunt mode and validation mode, how the system communicates confidence versus uncertainty. There is no "add to cart" button. The core interaction is asking a question and getting a verified answer.
• Experience Evolution. Our consumer surfaces change as we add categories (smartphones today, skincare and running shoes next), add partners, and add features. You'll know when to extend existing patterns and when to break them - and you'll have the research to defend the decision. A verification interface for smartphones has different information density requirements than one for skincare. You'll design the system that accommodates both without losing coherence.

Who You Are

• You have taste, and you can defend it with evidence. You can see gaps between what exists and what should. Your opinions about design are informed by observing real users, not following trends. Your portfolio demonstrates original thinking, not competent execution of established patterns.
• You ship fast and you learn from what you ship. You generate signal by shipping incomplete work, then iterating. You know the difference between polish and strategy - polish can wait, strategy can't. You've shipped a design that was "80% right," measured what happened, and used the data to get to 95%.
• You're code-aware and technically curious. You understand how designs live in React, CSS, and responsive contexts. You don't need to code production features, but you think like someone who does. You know which design decisions create engineering nightmares and which ones are trivially implementable. You prototype in code when it proves the interaction faster than a Figma prototype.
• You use AI as augmentation, not replacement. You know when AI accelerates your thinking and when it flattens your taste. You've used AI design tools to generate variations, explore directions, and speed up iteration. You have opinions about which AI design tools actually work and which ones are hype.
• You have product judgment that extends beyond visual design. You push back on decisions that sound good in a meeting but feel wrong in the interface. You've told a product manager or founder that their feature idea was solving the wrong problem, and you proposed an alternative. You work in public, share thinking in progress, and treat critique as signal, not noise.

Ownership
We operate as a high-performance studio, not a typical corporation. Every builder at Product.ai is a partner, not an employee collecting a paycheck.

• Base: $120,000 - $180,000. Competitive for the role level. Your base covers your life; your ownership builds your freedom.
• Equity: You receive a formal ownership stake via Profits Interest Units (PIUs) - Class B Membership Interests with a $0 strike price. Not options. Not RSUs. Actual ownership that participates in the upside from day one and qualifies for Capital Gains tax treatment.
• Profit Sharing: You participate in the company's annual success. As an equity holder, you receive a pro-rata share of Free Cash Flow (FCF) - real cash, every year, not a promise tied to a future exit.
• Liquidity: We operate an Annual Tender Offer where the company buys back vested interests at fair market value. You can turn ownership into cash every year. No waiting for an IPO. No hoping for an acquisition.
• Benefits: 100% premium coverage for you and your family, daily catered lunches, and unlimited PTO that we actually expect you to use.

How to Apply
We skip the 60-minute recruiter screen. Instead, you'll answer a few short video questions so we can get to know how you think and work. Less time than a phone screen, and you can do it whenever works for you.
The Process:

Click Apply.

Record short video responses to our questions (no prep required - we want to see how you naturally think).

Your responses go directly to the hiring team. No ATS. No keyword parsing.

We're not looking for polished presentations. We're looking for signal on who you are.