VP, Product Design

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.

Algolia does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, military status, veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

The annual base salary compensation range for this role reflects market pay data within this location. The exact compensation offered for this role may vary depending on specific location and job-related knowledge, technical skills, and experience; and is only one part of our Total Rewards philosophy to compensate and recognize employees for their work.

Base Salary Pay Range

£158,000—£197,000 GBP