Founding Product Designer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 16, 2026. First seen by Alion on Aug 3, 2026. Salient scores C on the Alion truth index.
About Us
Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.
We are:
Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding
Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years
Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry
Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day
Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions
Actively expanding into new financial services segments
Building together in person in San Francisco
We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.
We are hiring our first product designer to shape the next phase of the product. You will work directly with product, engineering, customers, and leadership to improve how customers build, manage, monitor, and improve our agents.
This is a hands-on role with broad ownership. You will help determine what we build, take projects from early ideas through launch, and establish the design foundation we need as the product grows.
What you’ll do
Own product design from customer research and early concepts through launch and iteration
Design how customers configure, test, launch, monitor, and improve AI agents
Build workflows for conversation review, quality assurance, approvals, escalations, and human intervention
Improve how our agents communicate across voice, text, chat, and email
Make agent performance, behavior, and outcomes clear to customers
Simplify complex, data-heavy servicing workflows
Work directly with customers to understand their needs and test new ideas
Partner closely with product and engineering to shape priorities and ship quickly
Build Salient’s design system and shared product patterns
Create a consistent experience across our five live agents and future products
Use Figma, rapid prototypes, and AI tools to test ideas quickly
Help define how the design function grows over time
What we’re looking for
5+ years of product design experience
Experience designing AI-powered products, agents, copilots, or human-in-the-loop systems
Experience designing complex B2B, enterprise, operational, or technical products
A portfolio showing work you personally owned from an ambiguous problem through launch
Strong interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and systems thinking
Experience designing monitoring, analytics, evaluation, or exception-management workflows
Experience working directly with customers and using feedback to shape the product
A track record of influencing product decisions rather than only executing requirements
Experience building or significantly improving a design system
Ability to design complete workflows, including permissions, edge cases, errors, and operational states
An understanding of how non-deterministic AI behavior affects trust, control, and product design
Experience partnering closely with engineers through implementation
Comfort using AI-assisted tools to prototype and explore ideas quickly
Strong communication and product judgment
Ability to work independently and create structure in a fast-moving environment
At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.
We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.
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