Head of Product Design

About the Role

Altana's mission is to fix globalization. We are building a network that brings together public and private sector entities, across myriad workflows from customs and transaction processing, to macro policy analysis, to supply chain resilience. As Head of Design, you will shape the product vision of Altana and bring it to life by creating a consistent, agent-first design system for handling a wide array of information-dense, complex workflows across governments, logistics providers, importers, and their suppliers.

You will redefine the role of product design in an AI-native software development lifecycle, where traditional design organizations fall short. The center of gravity for how experiences get made is shifting, and the design organizations that thrive will not be the ones that draw the most screens. You will help create a new world where the primary deliverable is not a static mockup but a living design system—a structured, semantic, machine-readable language that PMs, engineers, and AI agents can compose against to ship coherent, on-brand, high-quality experiences without a designer in every critical path.

Responsibilities

• Build an Agent-First Design Organization
  • Define what an agent-first design team looks like in practice—how it's structured, what it ships, what it measures, and how it scales with leverage rather than headcount.
  • Hire, develop, and lead a team of designers who treat AI as a teammate and a medium, prototyping in code with AI assistance and designing with agents rather than around them.
  • Establish rituals, review forums, and quality bars to keep a small team accountable for the experience of a multi-product, multi-persona network without becoming a bottleneck.
  • Champion a culture of "show, don't tell": working prototypes, agent-generated variants, and live demos over decks and static comps.
• Make the Design System the Product
  • Own the vision for Altana's design system as the enablement layer for product managers, engineers, and AI agents who build user-facing experiences directly.
  • Define the system as more than a component library: a structured set of patterns, tokens, content rules, interaction grammars, and accessibility guarantees that are semantic, composable, and legible to AI.
  • Build the contribution model, documentation, and tooling (including AI-native authoring and review tools) to make the design system the fastest, easiest, and highest-quality path to ship.
  • Measure the design system by leverage: how many net-new experiences ship without direct designer involvement, how fast new patterns propagate, and how much rework the system prevents.
• Design Agent-Native In-Product Experiences
  • Evolve Altana's in-product experience from human-only workflows to genuinely agent-native workflows, where agents act, explain, ask, and hand off to humans, and vice versa.
  • Define the visual and interaction language for new primitives: agent reasoning surfaces, provenance and citation patterns, confidence and uncertainty signals, interruption and consent moments, and human-in-the-loop review queues.
  • Partner with product and engineering to make agentic capability discoverable inside the existing product, not hidden behind a separate "AI" tab.
  • Treat every agent surface as a first-class design problem, addressing what it looks like when it's working, when it's wrong, and how users transition between agent-mediated and direct-manipulation modes.
• Design Across a Multi-Product, Multi-Persona Network
  • Own the end-to-end design strategy for a product suite spanning enterprise supply chain mapping, customs and entry management, PLM/ERP integration, government and regulatory tooling, logistics provider workflows, and financial services use cases.
  • Design for personas that share objects but not mental models: corporate trade compliance officers, licensed customs brokers, CBP officers, logistics dispatchers, suppliers, and AI agents acting on their behalf.
  • Build a design system that is opinionated about coherence but flexible about persona—one navigation, one visual language, one set of patterns—modulated by role, surface, and use case.
  • Make collaboration a first-class design surface: shared workspaces, handoffs across organizations, comments and approvals that cross enterprise/broker/government boundaries, and trust and access patterns.
• Lead as a Product Thinker, Not Just a Design Thinker
  • Operate as a peer to Product, Engineering, and Data Science leadership: shape strategy, make trade-offs, and own outcomes against business and network metrics.
  • Tie design investment directly to metrics that matter for a network business: activation, time-to-value, workflow completion, multi-party adoption, network k-factor, and product-led expansion.
  • Lead customer research and discovery as a strategic capability to influence what gets built, not just how it looks.
  • Translate design vision into a clear, compelling narrative that aligns the executive team, board, customers, and prospective hires around why design is a competitive moat for Altana.
• Partner Across The Company
  • Partner deeply with Engineering on the design-to-code pipeline: shared primitives, AI-assisted generation, automated accessibility and visual regression, and a contribution model where front-end engineers extend the system.
  • Partner with Product on roadmap and discovery, designing in the open with prototypes, not gating it behind handoff rituals.
  • Partner with Customer Experience, Marketing, and Sales to ensure the product experience, documentation, and communication all speak in one coherent voice.

Qualifications

• You think in systems, not screens. You want to design the system that produces great surfaces at scale, in the hands of people who don’t have "designer" in their title.
• You see the design system as your team's highest-leverage product and have built one that was actively used as such.
• You're agent-native, not AI-curious. You actively use AI tools to research, prototype, generate variants, critique, and ship, and you have opinions about agent-native UX formed by building it.
• You're a product thinker as much as a design thinker. You can make a credible case for what to build and why, understand business and network metrics, and hold yourself accountable to outcomes like activation, adoption, retention, and expansion.
• You design for many users at once, optimizing a single design system across radically different personas while keeping the experience coherent.
• You're a builder, not just a leader. You prototype, review work, write principles, and build leverage by raising the floor of the design system.
• You're technically fluent in modern web materials: CSS, React, design tokens, component APIs, accessibility primitives, and AI tools.
• You communicate with clarity and conviction, presenting design strategy to executives, customers, boards, and junior designers alike.
• You're energized by hard problems and high stakes, seeing Altana's design challenge as a feature, not a bug.

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in product or UX design, including 4+ years leading design organizations in complex, multi-product B2B or enterprise SaaS environments.
• A portfolio demonstrating ownership of a design system actively used by non-designers (engineers, PMs, and ideally AI tooling) to ship production experiences.
• Demonstrated experience designing AI-mediated or agentic in-product experiences, including patterns for trust, provenance, confidence, human-in-the-loop review, and graceful failure.
• Experience designing across multiple personas and organizations that share workflows—collaborative SaaS, multi-sided platforms, or marketplaces.