Slack VP, Product Design (Individual Contributor; Principal Architect)

About the role

As Slack VP, Product Design (Individual Contributor; Principal Architect) you will be one of the most important design voices shaping the future of Slack as an AI operating system where humans and agents work together to get things done. This is not a management role. It’s a rare seat at the table for a designer who wants to define the product; to hold the vision, drive the craft, and personally execute at the highest level on the next generation of Slack. You will report to the SVP & Chief Design Officer and partner deeply with product and engineering leadership to prototype, pressure-test, and shape the platform Slack must become.

Responsibilities

• Vision & Concept Design: Define and prototype the long-range design vision for Slack’s agentic future, producing the seminal concepts and vignettes that align the organization and inspire the roadmap.
• Executional Craft: Personal, hands-on design at the highest level, pixel-perfect, conceptually sharp, deeply considered. Uses whatever tools work best (AI, code, and emerging prototyping techniques) to turn ideas into working experiences fast, explore possibilities, and raise the bar. The bar you set becomes the bar for the team.
• Strategic Design Influence: Partner with the CDO, CPO, and Engineering leadership to shape product strategy through design. Influence decisions at the SVP and C-level through the power of your work and your thinking.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Drive alignment across product, engineering, research, and brand through the quality and clarity of your design work, without needing formal authority.
• Simplification as a Design Discipline: Lead the work to radically simplify Slack’s current experience, defining what we kill, what we keep, and what we transform as we move toward an AI-first paradigm.
• Emerging Interaction Patterns: Invent new design patterns for agentic UX, for voice-anchored experiences, ambient AI surfaces, multiplayer human-agent co-creation, and dynamic UI generation.
• User Advocacy at Scale: Be a relentless champion for the user, particularly the enterprise user under pressure; the worker with 500 unread messages, zero configuration tolerance, and no time to learn a new paradigm.

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years of product design experience, with senior IC work at significant scale.
• A portfolio that demonstrates both visionary concept work and exceptional executional craft.
• Proven ability to define product direction through design, not just respond to it.
• Experience designing consumer-grade experiences, deeply intuitive, delightful, effortless, in complex product contexts.
• A track record of influencing product strategy at the leadership level without relying on hierarchy.
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills; can make complex ideas simple and make simple ideas compelling.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing for AI, machine learning, or human-agent collaboration. Ideally at the interaction pattern level, not just the UI level.
• Experience with enterprise software and the unique constraints of B2B SaaS at scale.
• Familiarity with emerging modalities: voice UX, ambient/wearable surfaces, AI-generated UI.
• Experience working directly with C-suite leadership to define and evolve product vision.
• Understanding of Slack, its ecosystem, and what makes it uniquely powerful; and what needs to change.

What Makes This Role Different

Most senior IC design roles ask you to execute within a defined vision. This one asks you to be the vision while still doing the work. You’ll have the strategic altitude of a leadership role and the craft latitude of a builder role. You’ll ship things that change how millions of people experience their working lives.