Staff Product Designer, Handshake AI

Handshake · Enterprise · San Francisco, CA · Design

This role is for a Staff Product Designer at Handshake AI, focusing on building the vision for operator independence and self-serve tooling within their AI data business. The role involves partnering with various teams to define product strategies, translate insights into investments, and own the design process from concept to production. While the company is heavily involved in the AI space, this specific role is product-focused and does not involve direct AI/ML model development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partner with product, engineering, data, research, and operations to define and build the vision for operator independence and self-serve tooling.
  2. Develop strategic product visions and collaborate with partners to sequence them into pragmatic phases.
  3. Collaborate closely with Model Enablement and Fellow Experience squads—your work enables theirs.
  4. Partner with operations leaders and stay close to operators’ workflows. Run pilots, shadow users, uncover pain points, and translate insights into prioritized investments.
  5. Tackle complex, ambiguous human-centered problems and translate them into clear, simple solutions.

Skills

Required

  • 7+ years of product design experience
  • Strong communicator who clearly articulates design decisions, tradeoffs, and the thinking behind them to partners and leadership.
  • Deep visual and interaction design expertise, with a proven track record of shipped work and measurable impact.
  • Experience designing complex systems, workflows, or platforms with many moving parts and stakeholders.
  • Highly collaborative, valuing diverse perspectives and incorporating them into the design process to achieve better outcomes.
  • Design-led thinker who raises the bar by embedding design thinking into day-to-day work and helping others grow.
  • Impact-driven, with the ability to prioritize ruthlessly and focus on the work that matters most.
  • Hands-on, willing to roll up your sleeves and take ownership—nothing is “someone else’s problem”.

Nice to have

  • experience in operator or driver management, workflow or task management systems, or building internal tools for operations teams at a high-growth company.

What the JD emphasized

  • 7+ years of product design experience
  • ideally working on enterprise products, operations tooling, or internal platforms
  • Deep visual and interaction design expertise
  • proven track record of shipped work and measurable impact
  • Experience designing complex systems, workflows, or platforms with many moving parts and stakeholders