Staff Product Designer
Job Description
Plug Technologies Inc builds an automotive fintech marketplace for electric vehicles, partnering with OEMs, commercial accounts, and dealers. In this full-time in-person role in San Francisco, CA, you will own end-to-end product design across consumer, dealer, and partner surfaces as a senior individual contributor. You will work in close partnership with product and engineering, with an AI-forward workflow that supports fast shipping while maintaining a high bar for design governance, taste, and craft.
What you will do
- Own end-to-end design for OEM, commercial partner, and dealer-facing experiences, from early concepts through shipped and polished product.
- Set the bar for taste and craft across Plug and act as the standard the org calibrates against.
- Define how teams build by designing systems that help design scale, including design systems, prototyping and handoff workflows, and how the team uses Claude Design.
- Lead customer research directly through interviews, contextual inquiry, and usability testing to understand how partners and dealers work in practice.
- Apply a curious, AI-forward mindset to how product, engineering, and design collaborate in an AI-native workflow.
- Empower teams to move quickly with AI while maintaining design governance and strong decision-making.
- Translate complex B2B workflows (inventory processing, bidding, API-driven integrations) into interfaces that are simple, fast, and trustworthy for professional daily use.
- Drive innovation in how the team works with AI, not just what gets designed.
- Design independently with you providing final judgment as the org’s taste-maker.
- Scale your impact through AI-forward operations, working closely with product and engineering.
- Partner with product managers and engineers from problem framing through delivery, participating in trade-offs instead of operating only at handoff.
- Design and iterate using real usage data, session replays, and experiment results alongside qualitative research.
- Represent the voice of the customer in roadmap and prioritization using evidence, not opinion.
- Work directly with external partners (OEMs and commercial accounts) to understand their workflows and constraints.
What you bring
- 6+ years in product design, with a strong track record designing B2B SaaS products for professional or enterprise users.
- Excellent customer research skills, including the ability to proactively uncover what people need beyond what they say they want.
- Experience simplifying complex workflows such as dashboards, admin tools, partner platforms, and marketplaces.
- Comfort operating across design, product, and engineering, with strong opinions loosely held.
- Hands-on, shipped experience building with AI tools, along with ideas about how AI changes design work. As part of the process, you will be asked to show something you have built.
- Judgment about where to spend craft, with the ability to explain the difference between fast AI-assisted work and surfaces that require hand-made detail.
- Builder mentality: you act, not just plan, and you are energized by broad ownership in an environment where roles are fluid.
- Strong communication skills, able to present work, defend decisions with evidence, and influence cross-functionally.
- A portfolio demonstrating both craft and process, including how you got to the solution, not just final screens.
- Authorized to work in the US for any employer.
Compensation
Annual salary: USD 194,000 - 229,000
Salary ranges reflect independent, third-party benchmarking against national compensation data. An individual’s actual offer within the range depends on factors including relevant experience, specialized skills, training and qualifications, current business needs, and prevailing market conditions. Ranges are reviewed periodically and may be adjusted to reflect changing market conditions.
Benefits
- Health, Vision, and Dental insurance
- 401(k) plan
- 30 days work from anywhere per calendar year
- Daily lunch stipend
- Equity (based on role and performance)
- Unlimited PTO
- Fully stocked kitchen
- Dog-friendly office
- Ongoing opportunities for growth and development
Role details
- This is a full-time, in-person position.
- It is ideally based in Sawtelle (between Santa Monica and West Los Angeles). The company is headquartered in Los Angeles and provides relocation assistance for successful candidates who need to relocate.
- Candidates already based in the San Francisco area will also be considered; relocation is not required for these candidates.
- Sponsorship is not available at this time.
Plug is an equal opportunity employer. They do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Plug believes diverse teams build better products.