PolyAI automates customer service through lifelike voice assistants that let customers lead a conversation. Our voice assistants make it possible for businesses to deliver outstanding customer service that rivals their human agents. Our customers, which include the world’s leading logos, are expanding how they use our platform, driving automation of critical customer service operations and integrating PolyAI into their daily customer service workflows.
This is a critical leadership role responsible for defining and scaling PolyAI's design vision across our entire product ecosystem. As Head of Product Design, you will lead the Product Design function, shaping how millions of users interact with PolyAI across Voice, Webchat, WhatsApp, Email, SMS, and future AI-native experiences.
You'll be responsible for building a world-class design organisation, establishing a clear design strategy, raising the quality bar across every customer touchpoint, and ensuring design is a strategic partner to Product, Engineering and the wider business. You'll balance hands-on leadership with developing people, evolving design practices, and creating an environment where exceptional design can thrive.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead, coach and grow a high-performing Product Design team, developing designers at all levels.
- Build an inclusive, high-performance design culture focused on craft, impact and continuous improvement.
- Own hiring, organisational design, performance management and succession planning for the Product Design function.
- Set the long-term vision for Product Design and ensure it aligns with company strategy.
- Partner closely with Product, Engineering and Executive Leadership to influence company priorities and product direction.
- Ensure design is represented early in strategic decision making and product planning.
- Drive exceptional design quality across every customer experience.
- Establish clear standards for UX, interaction design, visual design, content and accessibility.
- Champion a cohesive design language and evolve the company-wide design system.
- Shape the future of conversational and AI-first product experiences.
- Champion AI-native design workflows and introduce tooling that increases team effectiveness.
- Help define emerging interaction patterns for agentic AI products.
- Build a strong user-centred culture across the organisation.
- Ensure product decisions are informed by customer research, experimentation and data.
- Balance user needs with commercial objectives and technical constraints.
- Establish scalable design processes that enable teams to move quickly without compromising quality.
- Strengthen collaboration between Design, Product and Engineering.
- Define how design contributes to planning, prioritisation and product delivery across the company.
What We're Looking For:
- Minimum of 8+ years of Product Design experience with several years leading high-performing design teams in fast-moving technology companies.
- Experience building and scaling design organisations through periods of rapid growth.
- Strategic Thinker
- Comfortable operating at both company strategy and execution levels.
- Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and shape product direction.
- Exceptional Product Sense
- Deep expertise across UX, UI, interaction and systems thinking.
- Strong judgement for creating intuitive, elegant experiences for complex products.
- People Leader :Passionate about coaching, mentoring and developing designers.
- Experience creating high-performing teams with clear career frameworks and strong design culture.
- AI & Innovation and excited by AI and emerging interaction paradigms.
- Proven experience leveraging AI throughout the design process and introducing AI-native workflows.
- Uses research, experimentation and product metrics to guide decisions and measure success.
- Comfortable creating clarity in fast-changing environments.
- Able to balance long-term vision with pragmatic execution.
- Outstanding communicator who builds trust across Engineering, Product and Executive Leadership.
- Excellent facilitator who brings diverse perspectives together to make better decisions.
- Experience designing complex SaaS, enterprise platforms or AI products.
- Familiarity with conversational AI is a strong advantage.
Embedded Team Experience: Experienced in being deeply embedded within a development team, working with a light touch from the Product Manager to deliver high-quality outcomes.
Benefits
💰 Participation in the company’s employee share options plan
🏝 Tenure-Based PTO: You will receive 25 holidays when you join and will gain an additional 1 day after 2 years of service, then 1 day each year until capped at 32 holidays
🏡 Flexible working from home policy
🌎 Work from outside of the UK for up to 6 months each year
🫂TELUS Health EAP 24/7 - offers you and your chosen family confidential, judgment-free support for any work, health, or life challenge
🧡 Enhanced parental leave
🚲 Bike2Work scheme
📚 Annual learning and development allowance
🏡 We’re all about making WFH work for you - that’s why we offer a one-off WFH allowance when you join. Offering perks like noise-cancelling headphones or a comfortable desk chair to boost your comfort and focus!
👨👩👧 Company-funded fertility and family-forming programmes
🌸 Menopause care programme with Maven
🏥 Private healthcare and dental cover, discounts on gym members and relaxation apps, and access to a range of mental health programs
🌎 Sabbatical Program: 5-week paid sabbatical available after 5 years of employment
At PolyAI, we take great pride in our values - they guide everything we do. We believe that a strong culture leads to meaningful work and lasting impact.
Our core values are:
Only the best
We expect the best from our people, we hire people that expect the best from themselves, and we nurture this drive for excellence.
Ownership
We care deeply about what we do. We take ownership of our initiatives, decisions and outcomes.
Relentlessly improve
We demand more from ourselves and are always evolving. Continuous, obsessive improvement is the only way we will transform the world of conversational AI.
Bias for action
Our world moves quickly and so do we. We take calculated risks and we deliver impact fast.
Disagree and commit
We are all working toward the same goal. If we donʼt agree with something, we work hard to understand it and when a decision is made, we accept it and give it our all.
Build for people
We want the world to enjoy the experiences they have with us. We are building for a future that prefers automation.
PolyAI is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All employment decisions at PolyAI will be based on the business needs without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, neurodiversity status or disability status.
Kindly find the Privacy Notice for our recruitment process by following the link here. This document provides important information regarding how we handle your personal data throughout the recruitment journey.