Principal Product Designer

Job description

Zuma is pioneering the future of agentic AI and our focus is to transform the rental market experience for consumers and property manager alike. Our innovative platform is engineered from the ground up to boost operations efficiency and enhance support capabilities for property management business across the US and Canada, a ~$200B market. Off the back of our Series-A in early 2024, Zuma is scaling rapidly. Achieving our vision requires a team of passionate, innovative individuals eager to leverage technology to redefine customer-business interactions. We're on the hunt for exceptional talent ready to join our mission and contribute to building a groundbreaking technology that reshapes how businesses engage with customers. Zuma has raised over $17M in funding to date and has support from world-renowned investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, King River, Range Ventures, and distinguished angel investors like YC’s former COO, Qasar Younis. As a **Principal Product Designer**, you will be the steward of product excellence and user experience across our entire platform. This is not just a design leadership role, it’s a chance to **fundamentally reimagine how people work and interact with intelligent systems** in one of the largest yet most antiquated industries: property management. Zuma is pioneering a new model of work through **agentic AI. S**oftware agents that autonomously complete tasks, communicate with residents, and provide actionable insights to human operators. Our product is unlike anything in the market: it doesn't just support workflows; it executes them while working with the existing human teams. And this means our design challenges are novel, multidimensional, and deeply human. You’ll be the primary architect of how Zuma feels**,** how our AI interacts with users, how insights are surfaced, how tasks are completed across channels, and how trust is built between human and machine. Your work will directly shape not only the interfaces users see but also the mental models they build, the workflows they adopt, and the outcomes they achieve. **You will:** **Collaborate at the highest levels of the company** as a member of the executive team, you'll work side-by-side with the founders to define product strategy and business direction. **Design for multiple personas** across a layered ecosystem: from corporate operators and regional managers to on-site leasing teams and the renters themselves. Each of these users has distinct needs, contexts, and interaction styles and your designs will need to respect and unify them. **Drive user-centric thinking** across the company, bringing a high-craft, systems-oriented approach to how we understand problems, experiment with solutions, and continuously raise the bar for simplicity, elegance, and usefulness. **Define new interaction patterns** for a world where users collaborate with AI, not just click through forms. You'll invent UI for things like intelligent agents, task orchestration, and real-time performance feedback, all grounded in trust, transparency, and efficiency. **Bring coherence to the Zuma experience**, ensuring that whether a user is viewing a KPI dashboard, replying to a resident, configuring an AI workflow, or triaging alerts, they’re operating within a beautifully unified system. **Scale the design function** from its early roots into a high-performing team, building the standards, rituals, and mentorship that shape a durable culture of product craftsmanship. This is a dream role for someone who wants to **build from first principles**, challenge conventions, and **lead design at a company where your craft and strategic thinking will shape how an entire industry evolves**. ### What We’re Looking For - 10+ years of experience designing and leading products with exceptional UX at early-stage or high-growth companies. - Track record of executive partnershipyou’ve sat at the table with product, engineering, and business leaders to shape bold product bets. - Deep experience designing complex platforms or tools, ideally for operations-heavy domains (e.g., enterprise SaaS, ops systems, AI interfaces). - A belief in the power of agentic AI, and you’re excited to pioneer new design paradigms for intelligent, autonomous systems. - First-principles thinker with a high bar for craft, your design work reflects creativity, clarity, and restraint. - Obsessed with human psychology, you study what makes people tick, what motivates them, what builds trust, and how to turn tools into emotionally resonant experiences. You understand that good design doesn’t just work, it *feels right*. - You build with love and care and you see each pixel, interaction, and microcopy as an opportunity to express empathy and respect for the user. - You have high emotional intelligence, you know how to read the needs behind the ask, how to bring people along, and how to balance intuition with evidence. - Strong product instincts and systems thinking, you connect user needs with platform logic and business outcomes. - Comfortable navigating ambiguity, legacy workflows, and rapid iteration in a fast-moving startup environment. ### Why You Might Want to Think Twice - This is a demanding role that will often require extended hours and deep commitment - You'll need to wade through technical debt and rewrite critical systems while maintaining product velocity - As a founding team member, you'll need to wear multiple hats and step outside your comfort zone - You'll need to make thoughtful tradeoffs between innovation and immediate needs - You'll interact directly with customers to understand their needs and occasionally travel to their offices - We're a startup - priorities can shift rapidly as we respond to market opportunities and customer needs - If you're not comfortable getting your hands dirty with legacy code or speaking directly with customers, this isn't the job for you ### Other Benefits - Great health insurance, dental, and vision. - Gym and workspace stipends. - Computer and workspace enhancements. - Unlimited PTO. - Company off-sites with the team.