VP, Product Design

<div class="content-intro"><div><span id="m_8220454926977230902gmail-docs-internal-guid-9a9f34f4-7fff-014a-c97c-98ca90610a47">Algolia is the retrieval intelligence layer that turns intent into trusted, decision-grade outcomes. Powering more than 1.7 trillion queries a year for over 18,000 customers with millisecond latency and 99.999% reliability, we are the recognized leader for Search and Product Discovery by top industry analyst firms. The Algolia platform turns a company's products, content, and business rules into data that humans, applications and AI agents can act upon. The result is trusted customer experiences with stronger conversions for measurable business impact.</span></div> <div> </div></div><h1><strong>The Opportunity</strong></h1> <p>As AI agents increasingly search, synthesize & act on behalf of users – the traditional search interface becomes optional – or disappears entirely. That makes the interfaces that remain matter more, not less – the surfaces where humans direct, constrain, trust & supervise intelligent systems.</p> <p>We're looking for a VP of Product Design to lead the organization that owns Algolia's Application Layer – the product surfaces where developers, merchandisers & business teams build, configure & optimize search & AI experiences – & Satellite, our design component library, the system that powers consistency & velocity across every Algolia product.</p> <p>This role sits at the center of our two foundational bets – becoming the retrieval & intelligence layer for agentic AI while deepening our hybrid AI search moat – executed in parallel, not sequentially. </p> <h3><strong>Three design challenges define the mandate:</strong></h3> <ul> <li><strong>Automation with control. </strong>Our customers demand deterministic control – an AI system that can't explain why Product A outranks Product B creates immediate friction. You'll close the gap between the promise of AI ease-of-use & the lived experience of customers – designing interfaces where business users set goals & constraints that guide AI behavior, with transparency & explainability built in.</li> <li><strong>Simplicity as a moat. </strong>Algolia's developer advantage is only as strong as its relative simplicity. As platform capability grows – our abstractions must improve faster than our complexity. The application layer is where that battle is won or lost.</li> <li><strong>Time-to-first-intelligence.</strong> Bottom-up adoption is non-negotiable. You'll own the product-led experience that lets a builder go from signup to a working, intelligent experience in minutes – re-earning developer affinity with each new generation of builders.</li> </ul> <p>We need someone AI-native – a leader who designs with AI (AI-assisted design workflows, design-to-code pipelines), designs for AI (agentic, conversational & generative interfaces) & builds a design organization whose operating model assumes AI as a core collaborator – humans shifting into supervisory & judgment roles as execution is delegated to systems.</p> <h1><strong>The Job</strong></h1> <h2><strong>What You’ll Own:</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Product design vision & strategy for the entire application experience </strong>– developer onboarding through enterprise-grade agent orchestration – tied to measurable customer outcomes: adoption, performance & impact in production.</li> <li><strong>AI design standards for the company: interaction patterns for agentic UX </strong>– trust & transparency, human-in-the-loop controls, streaming & non-deterministic states, explainability of relevance &a