Principal Product Designer

Inception42, a G42 company, is the region’s leading innovator of AI-powered domain-specific as well as industry-agnostic products, built on a rich heritage of research and development. Within the G42 ecosystem, Inception functions as the core intelligence layer - transforming data and compute infrastructure into real-world, applied AI solutions. Beyond its commercial endeavors, Inception is committed to creating positive societal impact. For more information, please visit www.inception42.ai

Overview:

G42 is building the compute, cloud, and data foundations for advanced AI to work at scale across government, healthcare, energy, finance and more.

Within G42, Inception42 is the layer that turns infrastructure into products people actually use. Our mission is to make advanced AI reliable, sovereign, and genuinely useful for some of the most important institutions and companies in the world. Our agentic systems strive to carry out real work rather than simply answer questions: Alpha, InSight and Vantage are applications for domain-specific intelligence; and Catalyst, our agentic platform, serves organisations who build and run agents while keeping sensitive data within the UAE.

The opportunity

We are looking for a hands-on Principal Product Designer to lead design work and manage a design pod across our AI-native portfolio: personal AI agents, executive intelligence, agentic workflows, governance platforms, and domain-specific solutions.

This is a role for an inventor. Your central job is to translate abstract vision - an executive ambition, a policy goal, a model capability that appeared six months ago - into concrete, innovative products that people trust and use every day. Your work will define how people should delegate real work to autonomous systems, and stay in control of the outcomes achieved by AI that are inherently non-deterministic.

You will own design from discovery through delivery, set the craft bar and the design systems across multiple products, and redefine the product design best practices at Inception42. You will work at the boundary of design, product, and applied AI - shaping not only the interface, but how the AI behaves with it.

Responsibilities:

Vision and strategy

• Define the product design vision, experience principles, and quality bar across Inception42’s portfolio.
• Translate abstract vision and emerging AI capability into concrete, innovative product concepts - and then into shipped experiences.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Science teams to shape product strategy and roadmaps, for both the near term and the long term.
• Turn business and government requirements into use cases and high-level customer experiences.
• Drive sharper design thinking and seamless processes across Inception42

Building AI-native apps, not just interfaces

• Work fast and run several projects at once, comfortable with ambiguity while managing stakeholder input, functional requirements, and timelines.
• Lead discovery, UX research, journey mapping, interaction design, prototyping, usability tests, and production.
• Own the full life cycle of AI-native design projects, from design strategy through to execution and launch.
• Design for AI uncertainty and failure with checks and balances to mitigate potential incorrect or fabricated output, incomplete information, refusals, streaming and latency, tool errors, and non-deterministic behaviour.
• Design intuitive experiences for AI agents, copilots, multi-agent systems, dashboards and conversational interfaces, and AI workflows across interaction patterns (memory, citations, long-running actions, etc.)
• Make AI capabilities and their limits legible, so users can calibrate their trust based on expected performance.
• Partner with Product, Engineering and Science teams to align AI experiences to their product designs across all layers: prompt and system design, tone of voice, output structure, content standards, and guardrails.
• Contribute to evaluation: define what good output looks like from the user’s point of view, and help build the rubrics, test sets, and human review loops that measure it.
• Ground designs in common sense, intuition, quantitative and qualitative data: UX research, market research, behavioural and telemetry data, and stakeholder feedback.
• Define success metrics with Product, Science and Engineering- adoption, task success, time-to-value, correction and abandonment rates, trust calibration - and instrument designs so those metrics can be read.

Design systems, best practices and outcomes

• Establish and govern scalable design systems across web, mobile, conversational, voice, and workflows.
• Design interfaces and interaction flows in Figma, other prototyping tools, and AI tooling for rapid idea generation; treat working prototypes as the primary way you align stakeholders.
• Develop and maintain clear design specifications, and hold all stakeholders to the set design quality bar
• Ensure products support English and Arabic, with right-to-left layout, bilingual typography and cultural context
• Design in line with sovereign and responsible-AI expectations: AI disclosure, privacy and data-residency constraints, auditability, and human-in-the-loop control.

Leadership and influence

• Operate as a hands-on leader: set direction while still solving the hardest design problems yourself.
• Recruit, mentor, and lead product designers, both full-time and contractors, while establishing strong standards for craft, critique, and product thinking.
• Present design work to Product, Engineering, Science teams, Inception42 leadership, government stakeholders, enterprise customers, and external partners - you are able to act upon and use their high level feedback well.
• Present complex, creative ideas in a way that is understandable to executives, engineers, and domain experts.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of product design experience, with experience managing teams for major design initiatives.
• An online portfolio demonstrating end-to-end product ownership, interaction design, visual craft, and measurable outcomes. Case studies should show your process and your decisions, not only final screens.
• Experience with best practices for user interface design, information architecture, and interaction design.
• Experience with life-cycle design projects, from design strategy through to execution.
• Experience designing complex enterprise, SaaS, workflow, operational, or data-rich products.
• Strong expertise in user research, information architecture, prototyping, usability testing, and design systems.
• Expert proficiency in Figma and other design and prototyping tools.
• Experience designing AI-powered products such as agents, copilots, conversational UIs, intelligent workflows.
• Practical understanding of human-AI interaction, explainability, trust, confidence, user control, and HITL.
• Familiarity with AI concepts such as prompts, context, RAG, citations, memory, evaluations
• Experience using AI-assisted design, coding, research, or prototyping tools in your day-to-day work.
• Strong leadership, stakeholder management, communication, and presentation skills,
• Ability to work with ambiguity and to find clarity in a fast-pacing and changing environment
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Product Design, Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction, or related fields

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with AI governance, workflow builders, decision-intelligence products, or enterprise AI platforms.
• Experience designing bilingual Arabic and English products; Arabic language ability is a plus but not required
• Familiarity with frontend technologies or design-to-code workflows, and the ability to prototype in code.
• Solid grasp of conversational and voice design fundamentals.
• Experience working directly with senior executives, government stakeholders, and enterprise customers.
• Experience in regulated domains such as healthcare, energy, financial services, or the public sector.
• Experience building or scaling a design function from a small base.

What We Look For

If you are a performance-driven, inquisitive mind with the agility to adapt to ambiguity, you will fit right in. You should be eager to explore opportunities to build meaningful collaborations with stakeholders and aspire to create unique customer-centric solutions. Bias for action and a passion to conquer new frontiers in the AI space is at the heart of the Inception42 community.

What Working At Inception42 Offers

Culture: An open, diverse and inclusive environment with a global vision that encourages personal growth and focuses on ground-breaking, industry-first innovations.

Career: Outstanding learning, development & growth opportunities via structured training programs and innovative, high-tech projects.

Rewards: A competitive remuneration package with a host of perks including healthcare, education support, leave benefits and more.

If you can confidently demonstrate that you meet the criteria above, please contact us as soon as possible.