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Principal Product Designer

Customer.io· Product & Design
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Hybrid (Americas)$245k - $276kfull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Principal Product Designer is the highest individual contributor design role at Customer.io. This role shapes the design vision for the company, influences design practice across the organization, and partners with product and engineering leadership. It is not a management role but is a company-wide leadership position.

Responsibilities

  • Shape and communicate a design vision for Customer.io's product as a whole — the coherent, long-range picture of what excellent looks like for our customers, brought into rooms where product direction gets set
  • Drive the strategic direction of Pluma, our design system — architecture, evolution, deprecation decisions, and the principles that govern how it scales
  • Close the gap between design intent and shipped product — stay close enough to implementation to catch divergence, and fix it directly when code is the right tool
  • Design for builder and developer audiences — CLI-native flows, API-first onboarding, and interfaces built for people who type before they click
  • Lead the design of agentic and human-AI surfaces across the product — develop the philosophy and advocate for the standards
  • Partner with product and engineering leadership on product strategy — bring design into the conversation before direction is set, not after
  • Develop and advocate for Customer.io's AI product design philosophy as a framework the whole team builds from
  • Lead design review for major initiatives and ensure quality and coherence across what ships
  • Develop Staff designers through mentorship, critique, and leading by example
  • Contribute to hiring and calibration — assess candidates and help the team develop a shared language for excellence

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of product design experience with a portfolio showing design vision and impact
  • Track record of shaping design direction at the company level
  • Designed for developer and builder audiences — CLI, API-first onboarding, or infrastructure-native products
  • Developed point of view on AI and agentic product design with shipped AI-native interfaces
  • Contributed to a design system at the strategic level
  • Operates with influence without authority — aligns product, engineering, and exec leadership around design direction without a management title
  • Raised the craft bar at an organizational level through critique culture and standards
  • Executive-level communication linking design decisions to customer impact, product differentiation, and business outcomes
  • B2B SaaS depth with opinions on complex, data-heavy products and interaction model breaks

Skills

Required:Design leadership and visionExecutive-level communicationDesign systems (Pluma)

Benefits

  • 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance premiums for you and your family
  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave
  • unlimited PTO
  • stacks for remote work and wellness
  • professional development budget
  • equity grant in the form of stock options
  • other inclusive benefits included in full benefits package
Last updated Oct 18, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Customer.io

Customer.io Platform: Automation, Data, Content Creation

The customer engagement platform for personalized customer journeys across all channels, fueled by first-party data.

AutomationContent CreationCustomer JourneysCustomer engagementDataFirst-party dataPlatformbrex-fastest-growing-2025
Company profileWebsite

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