Founding Product Designer

Description

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.

We are:

Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding

Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years

Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry

Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day

Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions

Actively expanding into new financial services segments

Building together in person in San Francisco

We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.

We are hiring our first product designer to shape the next phase of the product. You will work directly with product, engineering, customers, and leadership to improve how customers build, manage, monitor, and improve our agents.

This is a hands-on role with broad ownership. You will help determine what we build, take projects from early ideas through launch, and establish the design foundation we need as the product grows.

Responsibilities

• Own product design from customer research and early concepts through launch and iteration
• Design how customers configure, test, launch, monitor, and improve AI agents
• Build workflows for conversation review, quality assurance, approvals, escalations, and human intervention
• Improve how our agents communicate across voice, text, chat, and email
• Make agent performance, behavior, and outcomes clear to customers
• Simplify complex, data-heavy servicing workflows
• Work directly with customers to understand their needs and test new ideas
• Partner closely with product and engineering to shape priorities and ship quickly
• Build Salient’s design system and shared product patterns
• Create a consistent experience across our five live agents and future products
• Use Figma, rapid prototypes, and AI tools to test ideas quickly
• Help define how the design function grows over time

Requirements

• 5+ years of product design experience
• Experience designing AI-powered products, agents, copilots, or human-in-the-loop systems
• Experience designing complex B2B, enterprise, operational, or technical products
• A portfolio showing work you personally owned from an ambiguous problem through launch
• Strong interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and systems thinking
• Experience designing monitoring, analytics, evaluation, or exception-management workflows
• Experience working directly with customers and using feedback to shape the product
• A track record of influencing product decisions rather than only executing requirements
• Experience building or significantly improving a design system
• Ability to design complete workflows, including permissions, edge cases, errors, and operational states
• An understanding of how non-deterministic AI behavior affects trust, control, and product design
• Experience partnering closely with engineers through implementation
• Comfort using AI-assisted tools to prototype and explore ideas quickly
• Strong communication and product judgment
• Ability to work independently and create structure in a fast-moving environment
• At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week , beginning at 8:00 AM , with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.
• We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage , a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.
• By applying, you acknowledge that your personal information will be processed in accordance with our Privacy Policy (https://www.trysalient.com/legal/privacy-policy).
• Experience: Any (new grads ok)
• Visa: US citizen/visa only