AI Design Lead

About the Role
Validity is seeking an AI Design Lead to own the comprehensive design vision for Engage, our AI-powered email marketing platform. You'll understand our customers deeply, set direction for how the product looks, feels, and behaves, and hold the whole experience to a high bar. This is B2B software, so the job isn't a personal signature; it's exceptional taste and judgment applied to real customer workflows, keeping the product credible and coherent as it grows.

Our team is AI-native: Claude-native, code-centric, moving away from Figma, with prototyping built into the workflow. Designers are embedded in squads and own their workflows. Paired with people who bring the technical depth, your taste and judgment will be a critical input to the system and help us define what great design looks like on an AI-native team.

Increasingly, the product isn't just the UI at app.validity.com. We meet customers through Claude and other assistants, MCP and agent surfaces, and integrations with the tools they use already. These surfaces live outside the app we control, yet users still judge quality in the first second. Designing them well is harder than designing a screen you own and demands more taste and judgment. We want a leader who designs the whole experience of using Engage, wherever it happens.

We see design as two capabilities: systems and tools (tokens, components, and patterns that apply a standard at scale) and the eye (the judgment that decides what good looks like and holds the work to it), this role is about the eye. Technical chops across both are a bonus, but taste and judgment come first.

Position Duties and Responsibilities

• Own the product design vision. Set and hold the direction for how the whole product looks, feels, and behaves, from customer problem through UX to polished, shipped experience. You're accountable for the coherence and quality of the product as a whole, not individual screens or flows. 
• Set and hold a high bar. Bring taste and judgment to the work and lift the team to it, not by decree, but by raising the standard others reach for. Recognize the difference between good and great, articulate why, and get the work to great. 
• Understand the customer deeply. Sit in on and watch customer sessions regularly, keeping a live pulse on what every persona actually needs. Design from firsthand understanding of the workflows, not from a research deck. 
• Think well beyond the screen. We meet customers across many surfaces. Some owned by us, some not; some visual, some not. The web app is one piece of a larger whole; you need to design for the whole experience. 
• Design across surfaces we don't fully control. Much of the experience now lives outside our own UI. Define what "good" looks like on those surfaces and hold the bar there, even when you can't get them pixel-perfect and an agent is doing the rendering. This is harder than owning a screen end to end, and it's central to the job. 
• Partner closely with product and engineering. Settle UX and requirements early with product, while it's still cheap to change; keep the collaboration with engineering a shared, high-trust loop rather than a wall to throw work over. 
• Guide toward consistency without boxing squads in. Pull teams toward coherence where it genuinely helps, while respecting that each workflow may deserve its own treatment. Navigating that tension wisely is central to the job. 
• Help define design on an AI-native team. We build with heavy AI assistance (Claude-native, code-centric, moving off Figma, etc). AI handles a lot of the volume and the first drafts, which raises the bar on judgment: people own the decisions that require taste. You're comfortable with AI and genuinely interested in working out how great design happens on a team like this. You won't own the technical side alone, but your taste and judgment are a critical input to figuring out the system. 
• Teach, mentor, and build a feedback culture. Run a standing, high-trust crit practice and, more broadly, create a culture where people are comfortable giving and receiving candid feedback. This is where designers learn what great looks like and grow into it; your job is to teach it and to make honesty in the room feel safe and normal. 

Required Experience, Skills, and Education

• At least 10 years in product design, with a portfolio showing ownership of a product's design direction, a deep interest in and instinct for users and their workflows, and the experience to set a bar and lead a team to it.  
• A track record designing software for complex B2B workflows - professional users doing real, multi-step work, where credibility, clarity, and coherence matter more than visual flash.
• Proven experience shaping the user experience on surfaces you don’t fully control, such as integrations, embedded experiences, assistants, or agent-driven interfaces. You can define what “good” looks like when you can’t dictate the pixels.
• Hands-on experience using AI tools in your design process, and a genuine curiosity about how great design happens when AI produces much of the first-draft volume. You’re comfortable prototyping in code or with AI rather than relying on static mockups.
• A well-developed design sensibility, exceptional taste and the judgment to tell good from great.
• Deep understanding of the importance of direct customer engagement. A habit of sitting in on customer sessions and designing from firsthand understanding, not secondhand research summaries.
• Experience pulling multiple teams toward a coherent product while respecting that individual workflows may need their own treatment.
• Demonstrated experience developing high-trust, iterative relationships with Product and Engineering teams to settle direction early rather than a handoff model.
• Experience mentoring designers and running a regular, candid crit practice. You can explain why work is good or great, and you can bring a team along without relying on decree.
• Exceptional communication skills. You can articulate design decisions and standards in writing and in conversation, to designers, engineers, and executives.

Preferred Experience, Skills, and Education

• Hands-on technical skills, such as front-end code, design tokens, or design-system work. The posting says “so much the better” for these, but they aren’t required.
• Experience designing AI-powered products or agent and assistant experiences, including MCP-based surfaces.
• Experience in email marketing, martech, data-heavy or CRM products.

Salary range $170,000 - $200,000 plus benefits, bonus opportunities and stock options. Final salary may vary depending on skills, location, and/or experience. 

About Validity

Validity has operated at the center of the email ecosystem for nearly 30 years—shaping how it works, setting the standards others follow, and earning the trust of the world's biggest brands and mailbox providers along the way.

That trust is built on something unique: the world's largest email data network, comprised of proprietary signals from ISPs, exclusive mailbox provider partnerships, and more than 2.5 billion behavioral data points processed daily.

That data-driven foundation gives our AI a depth of context no competitor can replicate—and it's what powers Validity Engage, the AI email platform that enables enterprise teams to send smarter, more successful campaigns.

Validity is a truly unique company—massive revenue growth, top-tier investors, 5-star product ratings, proven ability to acquire and integrate top tech companies and welcome them into the Validity family, a winning culture, and a work environment that fosters hard work, trust, and fun.

Headquartered in Boston, Validity has offices in Denver, London, Sao Paulo, and Sydney. For more information, connect with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Validity is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment regardless of actual or perceived race, color, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, religion or creed, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, AIDs/HIV status, genetic information, military and veteran status, sex, parental status (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions, childbirth, post childbirth, nursing mother, parent of a young child and parent of a foster child), gender (including gender identity and expression), sexual orientation, marital status (including registered domestic partner status), or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

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