The posting
ABOUT STRELLA
Strella is an AI-powered platform revolutionizing qualitative research with real-time, AI-moderated interviews and automated synthesis. We're a fast-growing, venture-backed startup working with leading teams in product, marketing, and consumer insights.
Our users are often product leaders, designers, researchers, and other discerning teams who care deeply about how software looks, feels, and works. We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer who can pair strong product judgment with a high bar for craft—and who is excited to help build thoughtful AI-powered experiences from concept through production.
This is a high-impact senior individual contributor role. You’ll work closely with another Senior Product Designer, the CEO, engineers, and go-to-market teams to shape priorities and own important features end to end.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Own Features End-to-End
- Lead projects from early problem definition and requirements gathering through design, implementation, launch, and iteration.
- Flex into product work when needed: collect and document requirements, clarify tradeoffs, define scope, and keep cross-functional partners aligned.
- Work closely with the CEO to prioritize opportunities and translate company and customer needs into focused product bets.
- Take responsibility for the quality and outcomes of a feature—not just the design deliverables.
Design Polished, High-Quality Experiences
- Create intuitive, elegant workflows for a design-conscious audience, including product teams with a high bar for usability and visual craft.
- Research how existing products and best-in-class solutions approach similar problems, using relevant patterns and precedents as informed inputs to your designs rather than starting from scratch.
- Move fluidly between systems-level thinking and detail-oriented execution.
- Evolve and apply our design system so that the product remains coherent as it grows.
Build Thoughtful AI and Agentic Products
- Design agentic features that help users accomplish complex work while preserving clarity, control, and trust.
- Apply a practical understanding of AI’s production limitations, including uncertainty, latency, failure modes, user expectations, and the need for appropriate guardrails and feedback loops.
- Collaborate with engineering to understand model and system constraints, explore feasible solutions, and make informed product tradeoffs.
- Prototype and test new AI interaction patterns, then refine them using customer feedback and real-world behavior.
Collaborate Across the Company
- Partner closely with engineers throughout the process, not only at handoff, to understand constraints, evaluate tradeoffs, and maintain quality through implementation.
- Work with Customer Success and Sales to understand customer requirements, synthesize feedback, and validate proposed solutions.
- Collaborate closely with our other Senior Product Designer to critique work, strengthen shared patterns, and raise the quality bar across the product.
- Communicate the rationale behind decisions clearly and bring stakeholders along through ambiguity.
Prototype and Ship
- Work fluently in both Figma and code-based prototyping tools, choosing the right medium for the question and level of fidelity.
- Use prototypes to explore interactions, test assumptions, communicate ideas, and reduce uncertainty before implementation.
- Where appropriate, contribute directly to the production codebase, particularly on lower-risk, frontend-focused work.
- Use code and prototypes to close the gap between design intent and the shipped experience.
- Exercise good judgment about when to implement independently and when to partner with engineering.
WHO YOU ARE
High-Impact Attributes
- Craft-driven: You have exceptional attention to detail and a high bar for interaction and polish.
- Resourceful researcher: You actively study existing products, interaction patterns, and analogous solutions, synthesizing what you learn into stronger design decisions.
- Product-minded: You start with the problem, understand business and customer context, and make thoughtful scope and prioritization decisions.
- Owner: You’re comfortable driving ambiguous projects from an initial idea through a high-quality launch.
- Technically fluent: You collaborate effectively with engineers, understand technical constraints, and are comfortable using code to prototype and refine product experiences.
- AI-native: You understand what makes AI and agentic experiences useful, trustworthy, and viable in production—not just impressive in a prototype.
- Collaborative: You seek input early, communicate clearly, and work well across Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and Sales.
- Pragmatic: You balance ambition, speed, feasibility, and quality without losing sight of the user.
- Curious and humble: You ask strong questions, learn quickly, and change your perspective when the evidence supports it.
Experience
- 4–6+ years of product design experience, ideally in fast-moving B2B SaaS, productivity, research, or collaboration products.
- A portfolio demonstrating strong product thinking, polished interaction and visual design, and ownership of meaningful features from discovery through launch.
- Fluency in Figma and demonstrated ability to build interactive, code-based prototypes.
- Strong product and competitive research skills, with examples of using existing solutions and adjacent patterns to inform original design work.
- Experience designing AI-powered or agentic features that have shipped to real users, with a practical understanding of AI limitations in production.
- Experience partnering closely with engineers and navigating technical constraints and tradeoffs.
- Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to document requirements and explain decisions to varied audiences.
- Comfort working in a hybrid environment from our San Francisco office four days per week.
Especially Exciting
- You’ve designed products for product managers, designers, researchers, or similarly design-conscious users.
- You’re comfortable working in a modern frontend codebase and have shipped low-risk, frontend-focused product improvements directly to production.
- You have experience in qualitative research, insights, AI tooling, or complex workflow software.
- You’ve helped strengthen or scale a design system in a fast-growing product.
WHY JOIN STRELLA
- Shape the next generation of AI-powered qualitative research at a fast-growing, venture-backed startup.
- Own meaningful product areas from strategy and requirements through shipped experience and customer impact.
- Work directly with the CEO and collaborate closely with a strong Senior Product Designer, engineers, and customer-facing teams.
- Help define emerging interaction patterns for agentic software used by discerning product and research teams.
- Join a culture of curiosity, speed, ownership, and high standards.
- Competitive compensation with meaningful equity, benefits, and career growth potential.
If you’re excited to combine product ownership, exceptional craft, technical fluency, and practical AI experience, we’d love to meet you!
