Staff Product Designer

What You'll Do

• Own the product's design architecture.
  • Define the interaction primitives, conceptual models, and design principles that govern how users understand and work within nTop, across the existing workstation product and the new surfaces being built.
• Set cross-product design direction.
  • Identify systemic inconsistencies and opportunities before they become entrenched, and drive alignment across product management and software engineering.
• Work the problem with the people closest to it.
  • Partner with our forward-deployed field engineering team, who work directly with customers on real programs, and our UX researcher to identify the friction points that most affect users and our business.
• Define how AI capabilities reach users.
  • At nTop, AI means physics-surrogate models, generative geometry workflows, and engineering knowledge systems. Define the interaction patterns that make these capabilities useful and interpretable in practice.
• Establish the design foundation.
  • Create the design system, principles, and documentation that the software engineering organization can build against, and that future designers can build on.
• Partner with product and technology leadership.
  • Work directly with the VP of Product and CTO on roadmap decisions and architectural trade-offs.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of product design experience on complex, expert-grade software, including engineering tools, developer platforms, data or simulation systems, or equivalent.
• Demonstrated staff-level scope: you have owned design systems or platform architecture, not just features, and can point to organizational impact from decisions that outlasted your direct involvement.
• Systems thinker: skilled at designing abstractions, states, and constraints that remain coherent and extensible as the product grows.
• Strong information architecture instincts for expert users in constraint-heavy, precision workflows.
• Able to build alignment without formal authority, across software engineering, product management, and executive leadership, through clarity, craft, and well-reasoned argument.
• Comfortable in technical depth. You don't need to write code, but you need to participate as a peer in conversations about architecture, performance, and trade-offs.
• Familiarity with computational design, parametric modeling, visual programming, or physics-based simulation is a strong plus.
• Experience designing for AI-assisted workflows, including interaction patterns for uncertainty, model transparency, and human override.

Why nTop

• This is a role with real weight: you'll rebuild and lead our design function, with direct influence over the full product experience and a seat at the table for strategic decisions.
• Our users are engineers solving hard problems in demanding industries. The work is technically serious and the stakes are real.
• This role is based in New York and reports to the VP of Product.
• Career path: $180,000-200,000 annually plus options and benefits.