Principal Product Designer

The Role

This is a rare opportunity to define what consumer-grade AI coaching experiences look like at enterprise scale. You’ll join as a senior design leader on a small, high-velocity product-design-engineering team, where your work will directly shape how millions of users interact with AI coaching every day. This role is exciting because:

• Redefine the paradigm: Conversational and LLM-driven interfaces are still early. You’ll challenge existing patterns and establish new standards for AI-native product experiences.
• Design as a strategic unlock: At Valence, design isn’t decoration — it’s central to trust, engagement, and adoption. Your work will directly accelerate our product and company.
• True partnership: You’ll work alongside product and engineering leaders who deeply value design and involve it in every major decision.
• AI-native from day one: We’re building from first principles, not layering AI onto legacy systems.
• High performing PDE culture: We operate as a tight, collaborative team with intentional practices that make distributed work effective and energizing.

About Valence

We're the only company pioneering leadership coaching for large enterprises in an AI-first way. Our mission is to transform how the world's biggest companies approach learning and development, helping teams work better together through AI-powered personalization that adapts to individual goals and organizational culture using the latest advances in machine learning and natural language processing.

What You'll Do

- Design features that evolve Nadia from 1:1 coaching into a multiplayer collaboration platform, including context-sharing, team dynamics, and manager tooling

• Establish and evolve our design system to maintain craft and consistency as we scale
• Work embedded with product and engineering to ship high-quality experiences weekly, not quarterly
• Balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution - designing flows, refining interactions, and writing product copy yourself
• Collaborate intensively through working sessions, critiques, and paired design work
• Bring curiosity and experimentation to integrating AI into the user experience, exploring innovative UI and adaptive workflows.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of product design experience with a strong portfolio demonstrating consumer-grade craft
• Proven experience building and maintaining design systems that enable team velocity
• A track record of shipping quickly on small, scrappy design teams (not large orgs with specialized roles)
• Experience at a high-growth startup, helping scale from early stage to meaningful traction
• Shipped products used by millions of users, with measurable impact on engagement or retention
• Bonus if you have experience designing conversational interfaces, chat products, or LLM-powered experiences

You Thrive When You’re

• Collaborating intensively - thinking out loud, riffing in Figma, and building on others’ ideas
• Making fast decisions with incomplete information, then iterating based on what you learn
• Balancing craft with pragmatism - knowing when to polish and when to ship and learn
• Working across the full stack of design, from product strategy to interaction details to content design

This Isn’t the Right Fit If You

• Need to personally review and approve everything before it ships
• Prefeer long stretches of solo, heads-down work
• Want clearly defined swim lanes and minimal ambiguity
• Need large teams or heavy processes to feel productive