Lead Product Designer

Lead Product Designer

New York, NY (In-Office) · Full-Time

About Firefly

Firefly is building the defining physical AI company of the next decade, starting with safety.

We believe safety is the most important problem facing America today. Every school, hospital, hotel, workplace, and public venue relies on a patchwork of disconnected systems to understand and protect the people inside them. Most were built decades ago, rarely work together, and leave organizations operating without a real-time understanding of what's happening across their spaces.

Firefly is replacing that stack with a single AI-native platform that helps organizations understand their environment, coordinate action, and respond when every second counts. We combine intelligent software with beautifully designed hardware to bring consumer-grade experiences to one of the world's largest and most important industries.

In less than two years, Firefly has grown from an idea to protecting everything from boutique hotels to 30,000-student school systems, raising more than $27 million from leading investors along the way. Our team includes leaders from Apple and Verkada who care deeply about craft, speed, and building technology that matters in the real world.

Safety is where the need is most urgent, but the opportunity is much larger. Every physical space generates signals. Every organization needs to understand what is happening, determine what matters, and coordinate the right response. We believe the next generation of AI will move beyond screens and into the real world, becoming the system of intelligence that helps organizations operate and protect the spaces they are responsible for.

About the Role

Firefly is establishing a Product Design team to set the foundation for our software platform and define how modern AI forwards physical safety. As the core of this team, we seek a lead product designer to own and evolve the Ember platform. If you are a passionate, thoughtful designer looking to further your craft, we want to hear from you.

At Firefly, experience is a competitive advantage. This team will architect an end-to-end service where physical hardware, real-time environments, and digital platforms seamlessly protect spaces and communities. Our users rely on Firefly during high-stakes, time-sensitive moments. Because safety is on the line, your work must be thorough, thoughtful, and empathetic to people in crisis. You will bring consumer-grade polish to an industry plagued by clunky, legacy software.

This is an in-office role based in our New York City office.

You should apply if you:

• Want to ship, fast. When lives are on the line, we bias towards impact, building in rapid iterations directly with our customers.

• Love designing beyond the interface. Firefly is a comprehensive ecosystem, not an isolated interface or SaaS dashboard. Sweating the details of multi-user, multi-surface, real-time, high-stakes coordination excites you.

• Center users’ emotion. You consider the context as much as the interface and have an innate care for how Firefly supports our users in everyday moments and in unthinkable emergencies.

• Are passionate about craft. You are proud to be a designer and driven to further your craft. Whether solving complex logic, layout, and architecture problems or perfecting the details of visual systems. You want to continuously grow as a designer.

• Want to build with the best. You'll work alongside teammates from Apple, Verkada, and Smart Design who care deeply about craft and speed, and ship relentlessly.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the end-to-end design of the Ember platform: Concept, explore, design and launch new features, expanding our design language while evolving whole workflows across Firefly. You will shape the holistic experience of the Ember platform across mobile and web, help define our product architecture, and establish new industry defining interface patterns.

• Design for safer communities: Every design decision we make can save someone’s life. By considering complex edge cases, possible failures, operational constraints, you will champion safer communities while supporting safety teams to make split-second decisions with clarity and confidence.

• Design for multi-touchpoint user journey’s: Architect software that spans end-to-end services, adapting workflows for physical-to-digital journeys across multiple participants and devices.

• Drive design excellence: Apply strong fundamentals in visual hierarchy, typography, layout composition, and information clarity to build and scale interface components that safety operators can interpret quickly and rely on everyday.

• Ship iteratively: Develop solutions rapidly. You know how to prioritize for immediate impact now while planning for the system’s eventual evolution, using iteration and testing to find clarity in uncertain contexts.

• Design with our customers: Plan and run user research with installers, operators, and end users, converting what you hear into product decisions while defending user needs based on what came out of the field, not what we assumed at our desks.

• Set a Collaborative Design Culture: Working closely with founders, hardware teams, ML engineers, and software developers, you will help set the foundation of design collaboration across the org.

Minimum requirements for this role

• 6+ years of experience: In Product Design, Interaction Design, UX, or equivalent roles. Ideally with experience designing complex workflow software, real-time collaboration tools, connected hardware, or agentic systems.

• Portfolio: A strong portfolio showcasing a deep understanding of software design, system architecture, interaction principles, and a high bar for visual craft demonstrated through shipped products. We want to see your thinking and process, not just the polished outcome.

• Proficiency in product design: Demonstrable UX hard skills from product strategy and design ideation, to wireframing, system architecture, design systems, workflow design, and visual execution.

• Experience designing journey’s: The ability to think holistically about how software adapts across users, moments, and use-cases. Robust consideration of edge cases, states & variations, and proven ability to take on complex workflows that span touch-points and moments. Bonus if you can share powerful journey maps, service blueprints, ecosystem diagrams, or user flows that shaped core interactions in products you’ve owned.

• Visual polish: A passion for bringing the polish, delight, and simplicity of consumer apps to enterprise software. Strong visual design consideration across color, type, layout, data visualization and information hierarchy. Ideal candidates have experience designing map-based, spatial, or ‘3D’ interface elements.

• Technical literacy: Strong understanding of the technical constraints of interface design, ability to adapt design perfection to production limitations, and experience building collaboratively with engineering and technical teams.

• Deep User Empathy: You design with the user’s physical and emotional state in mind. Behavioral insight is built into your process, from formal user research and product testing to passive channels, desk research, and analytics.

• Ownership of outcomes: You care about speed, take pride in your work, and are comfortable navigating the ambiguity of an early-stage startup. You can defend quick, confident design decisions, even with incomplete data, while working autonomously across projects.

• Inclusive collaboration: You successfully integrate cross-functional constraints and non-design perspectives into your daily workflow. You handle critical feedback gracefully and resolve disagreements with respect, rationale, and user-centric framing.

• You ❤️ NYC: You want to work on-site with our team in New York City five days a week. We believe in the power of in-person collaboration to move fast and build great experiences.

An ideal candidate also has

• Experience at an enterprise hardware, IoT, or connected-device company where the device and the software ship together.

• A high caliber of visual design polish and ability to develop new brand system.

• Experience designing agentic workflows or AI-native products.

• Experience planning, leading, and synthesizing primary research, especially co-design and UX landscape studies.

• A high degree of versatility. Is eager to wear multiple hats, learn new design tools/skills, and adapt quickly to shifting requirements.

• Experience working and shipping quickly and iteratively.

• Exposure to hospitality, healthcare, education, public safety, or other regulated or trust-driven markets.

A note before you apply

Studies have shown that women and people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply for jobs unless they meet every single qualification. If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't align perfectly with every requirement listed, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be exactly who we're looking for.

Compensation

The base salary range for this full-time position is $160,000 – $200,000, plus equity and benefits. Actual compensation will depend on factors including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Firefly is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. We are committed to building a team where people from all backgrounds can make an impact. If you require accommodations during the application or interview process, please let your recruiter know.