Lead/Principal AI Product Designer
San Mateo, US
Product & Technology – Product: Design /
Permanent /
Hybrid
Our Purpose
At Xero, we’re here to help you supercharge your business. We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. When that happens, we’re not only making life better for small business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.
How You Will Make Impact:
- We’re building the next generation of SaaS experiences: AI-enhanced, customer-centric, and purpose Drive.
- As an AI Product Designer at Xero, you’ll help shape not just the future of our products, but the future of design in the age of AI. You’ll lead the creation of intelligent, world-class experiences that empower small businesses and their advisors. Working both independently and collaboratively, you’ll design with systems thinking, empathy, and fluency in emerging technologies like automation, agents, and AI copilots.
- Beyond the product, you’ll help evolve our design culture - sharing insights, elevating our craft, and shaping how we work. We believe great design simplifies complexity, builds trust, and creates meaningful value for our customers and teams.
What You'll Do:
- Designing Intelligent, Adaptive Experiences:
- Designing end-to-end product experiences, taking new products from 0 to 1.
- Design intelligent systems that balance usability, automation, and human–AI collaboration.
- Explore and shape AI-powered workflows where outcomes evolve dynamically.
- Apply strong interaction, systems, and visual design skills to solve real customer problems at scale.
- Contribute to Xero’s evolving design systems for both traditional and AI-native interfaces.
- Accelerating with AI and Emerging Tools:
- Use AI tools to accelerate exploration, storytelling, and prototyping.
- Grow AI adoption and fluency across the design team.
- Product and Strategic Thinking:
- Partner with Design, Product, and Strategy leaders to define a clear design vision aligned to broader goals.
- Work closely with Marketing, Product Management, and Engineering to deliver cohesive end-to-end experiences.
- Align design direction with product and company strategy.
- Contribute to the development and refinement of design patterns—or create new ones where neededScale and evolve solutions across teams and product areasMaintain positive relationships across teams and functions.
- Research and Insight-Driven Design:
- Partner with researchers and contribute to qualitative and quantitative research.
- Uncover deep insights into customer behaviour and emerging usage patterns.
- Collaborate on ethical, safe, and explainable AI practices.
- Relationship Management:
- Mentor and coach designers to make better product decisions.
- Influence, challenge, and enable teams to raise the bar on design quality.
- Help build and improve strategic design practices, tools, processes, and frameworks.
- Lead regular design sessions to guide and support cross-team collaboration.
- Simplify complex design and technology challenges, helping teams navigate them effectively.
What Success Looks Like:
- You lead high-impact design on priority AI initiatives, delivering thoughtful, AI-augmented experiences that customers trust and love. You bring clarity to complex problems, turning ambiguity into elegant, scalable solutions.
- You demonstrate future-ready design skills, from prototyping with mock data to shaping agent behaviors and prompt patterns.
- You elevate design quality by sharing insights, strengthening systems, and inspiring others to adapt and grow.
- You help build a responsible design culture rooted in empathy, ethical thinking, and everyday experimentation.
What You'll Bring with You:
- Ability to learn, adapt and embrace new technologies and ways of working.
- Track record of innovating and delivering design experiences at scale Demonstrated quality in design craft, process and thinking.
- The ability to work at a fuzzy high level, and deal well with ambiguity.
- Recognized as an expert within the field of design, with extensive design specialist knowledge.
- Excellent communication skills.
- An inclusive, collaborative approach that helps maintain our values and contributes to making Xero a great place to work.
- Experience with AI design tools as part of your core workflows and practice.
- Experience in designing multi-modal AI experiences across multi platforms and devices.
- Experience leading other designers working on complex software and services.
- Experience building and iterating on a product based on usage patterns, user feedback and an evolving strategic landscape.
- A portfolio that demonstrates high-quality design outcomes, Contributing to user experience and business value.
- A mastery of the entire design process from uncovering customer needs and pain points, to executing elegant interfaces.
$209,300 - $232,600 a year
Why Xero?
Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond. Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, employee resource groups, wellbeing programming and allowances, medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance, fertility and family forming financial support, 401k contribution matching, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with snacks and break areas, flexible working, career development and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.
Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience. If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.
