Principal Product Designer - Customer.io

About Customer.io

Over 9,000 companies—from scrappy startups to global brands—use our platform to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. We help teams send smarter, more relevant messages using real-time behavioral data.

About the Role

As a Principal Product Designer, you are the highest-level individual contributor in design at Customer.io. You will shape our design vision, influence our design practice, and partner closely with product and engineering leadership. This is a leadership role that focuses on craft, vision, and organizational impact rather than people management.

What You'll Do

• Shape Design Vision: Define the long-range picture of product excellence and advocate for it in strategic rooms.
• Lead Design Systems: Drive the strategic direction of Pluma, our design system, including architecture and scaling principles.
• Bridge Design and Code: Stay close to implementation to ensure design intent is realized, fixing issues directly when necessary.
• Design for Builders: Create experiences for developer-centric audiences, including CLI-native flows and API-first onboarding.
• AI Strategy: Develop and advocate for our AI product design philosophy, leading the design of agentic and human-AI surfaces.
• Strategic Partnership: Collaborate with leadership on product strategy before direction is set.
• Mentorship: Develop Staff designers through critique and example, and contribute to hiring and team calibration.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of product design experience with a portfolio demonstrating organizational impact.
• Track record of shaping direction at the company level, influencing what gets built and why.
• Experience with developer/builder audiences (CLI, API-first, or infrastructure products).
• Point of view on AI: Experience shipping AI-native interfaces and a clear philosophy on agentic interaction models.
• Design System expertise: Strategic experience shaping and advocating for design systems over time.
• Influence without authority: Ability to align cross-functional teams around a design direction.
• Executive communication: Ability to connect design decisions to business outcomes and customer impact.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $245k-$276k USD (subject to market-rate adjustment).
• Insurance: 100% coverage of medical, dental, vision, mental health, and supplemental insurance for you and your family.
• Time Off: Unlimited PTO and 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Support: Stipends for remote work and wellness, plus a professional development budget.