Director of Product Design, AI & Agentic Workflows

ABOUT THE TEAM At Mural, we're building a new layer of collaboration — one where people and intelligent systems work together in real time. The Design and Research team turns complexity into clarity, shaping how humans and AI co-create, collaborate, and reason inside a shared visual canvas. You'll lead a small team of designers, and you'll personally own the point of view on how agents behave across Mural's platform. This role sits at the intersection of people leadership and interaction craft: you're building both a team and a discipline. At Mural, we “drink our own champagne” and use our product daily to collaborate, ideate, and prototype together. Your design work will shape how millions of people around the world collaborate. YOUR MISSION As the Director of Product Design, AI & Agentic Workflows you'll define what agent-native design means at Mural, then build the team and the pattern language to make it real everywhere. You’ll work across all surfaces, defining the underlying grammar for how agents disclose intent, request permission, hand off control, signal confidence, and recover from error across every part of the product. You'll lead a small team of designers who ship against that grammar, and you'll stay hands-on yourself — prototyping the hardest, highest-ambiguity interactions rather than delegating all of it away. This is a working director role: management and craft are both core to the job, not one traded off for the other. You’ll have the chance to invent how the world collaborates. You’ll design experiences that help teams think visually, work faster, and create together in ways that feel natural and expressive. You’ll partner with a deeply creative and cross-disciplinary team that values curiosity, clarity, and craft. WHAT YOU'LL DO Team Leadership: Hire, develop, and manage a small team of product designers working on agentic and AI-native experiences Set craft standards and help run critique; give direct, specific feedback that raises the bar Own your team's roadmap and staffing in partnership with product and engineering leads Represent your team's work, capacity, and needs to the VP of Design and cross-functional leadership Pattern Ownership: Define and maintain Mural's interaction pattern language for agent behavior, including permission, disclosure, handoff, confidence, error recovery. Think of it as the same relationship a design systems team has to typography and color, applied to agent behavior instead Use code and rapid prototyping as a primary design tool to pressure-test agent behaviors, not just visuals — "vibe coding" real interactions to see how they actually feel Establish reusable primitives (components, states, motion, copy patterns) that the broader design org and other squads build on, so agentic patterns compound instead of getting reinvented per feature Personally take on the hardest, least-defined interaction problems — the role stays in the work even as it scales through a team Strategic, Cross-functional Leadership: Represent design's point of view in product strategy conversations about where and how agents show up in the platform Partner with research to build a shared evidence base for control, autonomy, and trust tradeoffs Lead workshops and design sprints to align stakeholders around ambiguous, agent-related decisions Contribute to Mural's external voice on AI-native design as a natural extension of leading the discipline internally WHAT YOU'LL BRING 15+ years of product design experience, including recent experience managing and growing designers — ideally in ambiguous, 0→1 problem spaces A track record of defining or evolving a design pattern language or system — behavior-based systems preferred over purely visual ones Familiarity with agent-based or AI-assisted experience design: memory, context windows, tool use, autonomy/control tradeoffs Comfort using code as a design tool — prototyping and vibe-coding to explore interaction and system behavior, not just wireframing it Strong systems thinking: you understand how design decisions cascade across flows, surfaces, and journeys Experience partnering with engineering to evolve prototypes into scaled, shipped implementations Experience representing design in senior, cross-functional strategy conversations Deep empathy for diverse, global users, with experience designing for accessibility and inclusivity at scale Also great if you bring Experience growing the capabilities of a design team from a small base Background in multi-agent systems, orchestration, or workflow automation Experience with canvas-based or spatial interfaces Experience designing with structured and unstructured data in the same environment A history of shaping 0→1 products or platform-level capabilities Public writing, speaking, or thought leadership on AI-native design Equal Opportunity We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.