Lead Product Designer

Lead Product Designer

Team: Product, Research & Design

Prolific

Prolific is not just another player in the AI space – we are the architects of the human data infrastructure that's reshaping the landscape of AI development. In a world where foundational AI technologies are increasingly commoditized, it's the quality and diversity of human-generated data that truly differentiates products and models.

The Role

As the Product Design Lead in the Prolific for Participants Group, you will lead the design vision, strategy, and execution across three cross-functional teams. You’ll oversee participant experiences and authenticity within both our global marketplace and our dedicated specialist pool, as well as the internal services powering our participant models.

In addition to this leadership responsibility, you will be the hands-on designer responsible for the outcomes of a core participant domain, reporting to the VP of Product and collaborating with a world-class team of product engineers, AI researchers, and data scientists – as well as product managers and designers across Prolific.

You bring a background in crafting user-psychology-informed experiences for large-scale audiences and a natural ability to synthesize complex systems into elegant and transparent solutions. Thriving in ambiguity and juggling multiple initiatives, you move at a rapid pace while galvanizing exceptional performance around you. Ultimately, your success will be defined by your conceptual clarity, peer-to-peer bridge-building, and your consistent ability to bring the participant “into the room

Our Product, User Research, and Design Team indexes heavily on drive, commercial acumen, and pragmatism. Building on our Prolific Principles, we expect you to demonstrate reliability, grit, and bravery, and to model these traits within the team. You’ll be given a lot of trust and autonomy in return, as is always the case within Product at Prolific.

What you'll be doing

You'll bring your rich and varied design career experience to bear to solve customer problems and create new moments of joy for our participants who use Prolific—both ‘pocket money’ academic research participants around the world and deeply skilled experts working on AI training and evaluation.

You’ll build extensively for internal use cases and users, including in participant modeling platforms and tools for our Human Data Ops team.

You’ll raise the bar in our Design Team, and co-own cross-functional areas like accessibility (we are WCAG 2.1 AA compliant) and our Design System with other design leaders.

You will line-manage a group of 1-3 designers directly, and mentor others, coaching behaviours and skills, and modeling game-changing approaches by directly doing.

You'll have user research and data analysis responsibilities

What you'll bring

An extensive and varied track record of in-house product design work alongside product managers and engineers. (Pure agency experience is likely to be screened out.)

Experience in either line-managing or acting as player/coach for other designers.

Confidence working with AI prototyping tools. We use Figma Make.

Competence or expertise in the industry's standard design tools, principles, and methodologies, and a basic to detailed understanding of how AI models work.

Even better if you have

A lived experience of a rapidly scaling startup – especially if you loved it!

AI training experience, or a data science or computer science background.

A track record of giving back to your Product/Design community.