Design Lead

About the role

Ajaia, an AI implementation consultancy and product studio, is hiring a Design Lead to run discovery and design on client engagements and on its own product suite. The role is hands-on: you do the research and the design yourself, turning observations of how work is done into journeys, wireframes and prototypes that engineers can build from. It is based on-site in New York, with client-site travel for discovery work.

Key responsibilities

• Run discovery on client engagements: interview the people doing the work, observe them, and find the gap between what they say and what they do.
• Talk to users of Ajaia's own products with the same rigor as client work.
• Synthesize findings into what people actually need, with evidence for each.
• Design user journeys, wireframes and prototypes that an engineer can build from without guessing.
• Decide where a human must sign off in a workflow and design that checkpoint into the product.
• Test designs with real users before code is written.
• Push back on a stakeholder's feature list when the evidence points elsewhere, explaining why in terms they can act on.
• Own the design standard across the product suite so a designer joining later does not have to reinvent decisions.
• Prototype with AI tools as a default, and hand off design work in a state an engineer can start from.

Required profile

• Comfortable running discovery yourself: interviews, usability testing and reading behavioral data.
• Comfortable working directly alongside engineers through build.
• Comfortable holding a room when the evidence points somewhere a stakeholder does not expect.
• No minimum years required; the company hires on the work.
• Bachelor's degree preferred but not required.

Required skills

• AI fluency: using AI daily to research, synthesize and prototype, and telling good output from slop.
• Staying current with new design and prototyping tools.
• Nice to have: experience designing AI-native workflows, consulting or agency experience with concurrent clients, and comfort with lightweight front-end implementation.

What we offer

• Base pay of $90,000 to $210,000 depending on experience, plus a performance bonus of up to 100% of base salary.
• Competitive benefits.