Lead/Principal Experience Designer - AI Prototyping

We are seeking a Lead/Principal Experience Designer with AI-Enabled Prototyping experience who will shape new ways for modern and emerging technologies to improve how footwear and apparel are imagined, designed, and made. This person combines strong design judgment, systems thinking, and hands-on making to turn ambiguous opportunities into clear experience directions and working prototypes. The role leads projects from early opportunity framing through prototype validation, partnering closely with experience research, product, engineering, and innovation teams. They use AI-enabled tools to accelerate exploration, make ideas tangible, and learn quickly, while keeping human needs and experience quality at the center of decisions. This designer does not wait for users or stakeholders to define the solution. They uncover latent needs, interpret incomplete and sometimes conflicting signals, form hypotheses, and test what could create meaningful value in a fast-changing innovation environment.

Core Responsibilities

• Lead complex experience-design projects independently, creating clarity, momentum, and alignment from opportunity framing through validation and delivery.
• Define the experience vision, principles, journeys, interaction models, and success criteria that keep teams focused on the right problem.
• Translate research, behavior, stakeholder input, and emerging possibilities into hypotheses, design decisions, and focused experiments.
• Use AI-enabled workflows to rapidly explore concepts and build interactive or coded prototypes with Figma, Figma MCP, Cursor, or comparable tools.
• Create prototypes at the level of fidelity needed to answer the next critical question, test assumptions, and reduce risk before teams commit to a solution.
• Partner with engineering to understand constraints, shape solution approaches, and make informed trade-offs without allowing technical feasibility or speed alone to define the experience.
• Recognize that users may articulate current pain points but not the future solution; uncover latent needs and validate what could create meaningful value.
• Communicate decisions through clear narratives, evidence, and tangible prototypes that help working teams and senior leaders understand the opportunity.
• Contribute reusable prototyping patterns, AI workflows, design-system practices, and studio standards that improve quality and learning velocity.

What We're Looking For

• A strong design thinker and maker with deep foundations in human-centered design, interaction design, and digital product thinking.
• Demonstrated experience leading ambiguous, cross-functional work independently and moving it toward valuable, validated outcomes.
• Fluency with AI-assisted design and development workflows and the ability to move quickly from an idea to a prototype that can be experienced and evaluated.
• Technical fluency sufficient to collaborate credibly with engineering, work in design and code-adjacent environments, and understand system constraints.
• Strong judgment about when to use AI, when not to use it, and how to evaluate generated work for quality, accuracy, accessibility, security, and responsible use.
• Clear communication, facilitation, and storytelling skills, with the ability to connect user evidence, experience intent, business value, and technical implications.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in experience design, product design, interaction design, service design, or a related field.
• A portfolio showing end-to-end leadership of complex digital products or innovation concepts, including framing, interaction design, prototyping, testing, and shipped or validated outcomes.
• Experience partnering with engineering in an agile or iterative product-development environment.
• Demonstrated use of AI-assisted tools to accelerate exploration, prototyping, or delivery. Experience with Figma, Figma MCP, Cursor, GitHub-based workflows, or comparable tools is preferred.
• Experience with complex systems, internal tools, emerging technologies, or product-creation workflows is preferred.