The mandate: Own end-to-end product design across Retell's core workflows — early concepts and PRDs through shipped features. Work directly with founders, engineers, and customers to shape features from first principles. The line that matters most for recruiting: "not just polish UI after decisions are made." Most senior designer roles at $180K+ are exactly that — the decisions are made upstream and design executes. This one explicitly isn't, and the JD backs it up with "influence product direction through design" and "contributing strong opinions, clear rationale, and taste-driven decisions that shape what we build next." Note the design system overlap. This req says "build and evolve Retell's design system." The Design Engineer req says "build and own the Retell design system." Ask Retell how that's split — a designer who thinks they own the system and finds out the design engineer does will be unhappy. The likely division is designer sets the visual language, design engineer builds and maintains the code implementation, but that should be stated rather than assumed. What You'll Own
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End-to-end product experience: early concepts and PRDs through polished shipped features
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How users interact with AI voice agents — turning complex technical workflows into clear, human experiences
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Feature definition and refinement side by side with engineers and founders, preserving design intent through to production
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Customer research — interviews, feedback, translating real pain into design solutions
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Proactive UX improvement: identifying friction and inconsistency, driving fixes idea to launch
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Design system evolution, standards for consistency and scalability
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The craft bar — clarity, usability, polish
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Product direction, through design opinions with rationale behind them Requirements Hard gates:
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5+ years as a Product Designer on shipped products. Higher floor than the Design Engineer req.
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Strong user-centered design background — HCI, design, or equivalent
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Excellent product taste — usability, hierarchy, visual clarity
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Detail-oriented, cares about polish and consistency
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Comfortable in fast-moving ambiguity
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Wants end-to-end ownership, not a narrow design scope
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On-site, Redwood City Profile:
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5–10 years, senior enough to hold a design bar without a design lead above them
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Enjoys working with engineers, PMs, and founders on product direction
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Has opinions and can defend them with rationale Strong bonuses:
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Complex B2B or technical product design — dashboards, developer tools, configuration-heavy interfaces, observability. Directly matches agent config, CRM views, and call review.
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Has designed for non-deterministic or AI systems — the rarest and most relevant experience available. Anyone who's worked on agent configuration, model evaluation UI, or probabilistic-output interfaces should go to the top of the list.
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Real customer research practice — the JD names "be the voice of the user" as a core responsibility, which is unusual for a $180K+ IC design seat and means no researcher exists
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Data-dense interface work: analytics, monitoring, log and transcript review
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Design systems experience
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CCaaS or contact center domain knowledge
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Startup experience where they were the first or only designer Location and visa:
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On-site, Redwood City
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Sponsorship: H-1B, TN, L-1, E-3, F-1 (OPT/CPT), and O-1 Anti-patterns
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Designers who execute against decisions made elsewhere. The JD rejects this explicitly and it's the most common senior-designer profile at large companies.
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Visual designers with no UX depth
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UX researchers who don't ship interfaces
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Marketing and brand designers
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Consumer-only designers with no complex B2B experience — the surfaces here are configuration-heavy and technical
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Designers who need a PM to define the problem
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Anyone who needs a design org, a research team, or a content designer to function
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Portfolio of redesign concepts with nothing shipped
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Remote requirements Who Will Thrive Here
Someone who has designed a genuinely hard B2B product and can defend every decision in it. They'll interview a VP of CX on Tuesday, come back with a reframed problem, and have a working prototype by Friday. They have taste and won't be talked out of it, but they show their reasoning. They want the unsolved problem — how do you make a probabilistic system legible and trustworthy to an operator — more than they want a title or a team.