Lead/Principal AI Product Designer

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.