Principal Product Designer

Principal Product Designer

Department: Gitwit

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Bentonville, AR

Compensation: $140,000 - $170,000 / year

Zero-to-One Product Design for AI-Native Ventures

Gitwit is hiring a Principal Product Designer to lead the product experience for new AI companies, and to set the standard of design quality the whole studio builds to.

You will decide what the product should be and design it to a level of finish that holds up in front of real users. This is a seat for a designer with strong product judgment.

This is a senior seat, and the designers who thrive in it tend to share a few things:

• 5+ years in product design
  , hands-on and deep in the craft.
• Experience taking products from zero to one.
• A portfolio of work you can share that showcases your experience.

Most of all, we're looking for someone whose craft and judgment make the people around them better.

Gitwit is an AI-first venture studio built to find problems worth solving, validate them rigorously, and build the companies that earn the right to exist.

We are on pace to launch 15+ ventures in the next four years. For a designer, that means repeated chances to work on the most interesting part of company building: the first version.

You are not maintaining one mature product for years. You are helping create new companies from the beginning, shaping the ambiguity, getting close to users, making the product calls, building the prototypes, launching, reading early signal, and handing off to a founding team.

The pace only works if design can make the first clear product calls before everything is figured out. We need someone who can jump into a half-formed venture, figure out what the product needs to become, and help the team learn before we overbuild.

You come in as a design lead from day one. We launch around five companies a year, and one or two of them will be yours to lead across the year. You own the product experience from early concept through prototype, first launch, user learning, and iteration.

You help set the quality standard here. The ventures you lead carry your fingerprints on how they look, how they behave, and how finished they feel the day they meet their first users. When a founding team inherits a product from you, they should inherit a clear design system, resolved states and edge cases, and specs an engineer can build from directly.

You will work shoulder to shoulder with discovery, product strategy, engineering, brand, and venture leadership to shape the first version of the company and product. The vision is shared. The product experience- how it works, how it feels, where it earns trust, and where it gets out of the user's way- is yours to lead.

Early on, the work is hands-on: wire framing in a room, shaping feature plans, prototyping with AI, sitting with users, and pulling apart what they say, what they do, where they hesitate, and what they actually need.

You are never tossing screens over a wall. You build next to an engineer in tight rotation, make product calls, test them quickly, and keep the distance between decision and working product short.

After the initial product, you stay close to what happens next: what users understand, where they hesitate, what breaks down, and what the early signal suggests, and turn that learning into sharper decisions and better next versions. When the product has enough shape and the right founding team is ready to carry it forward, you make the handoff clean, then move to the next early product problem.

• Set and hold the visual and interaction quality standard for the studio's products.
• Lead zero-to-one product design for new AI products, from blank canvas through first launch and iteration.
• Resolve the hard parts: the states, edge cases, and interaction details that make a product feel finished.
• Design AI workflows where the product may not behave the same way twice, changing outputs, wrong or uncertain answers, human review, approval moments, fallback paths, and clear next steps.
• Generate multiple design directions, weigh tradeoffs, make the call, and explain the reasoning clearly.
• Prototype quickly to help the team learn what is real before overbuilding.
• Translate user observation, research, and usage signals into product hypotheses, experiments, and design decisions.
• Work tightly with product strategists, researchers, engineers, designers, and venture leaders to turn a promising idea into something real enough to test.
• Bring discipline and meticulousness to how design gets built across the studio, so each product does not have to reinvent the basics from scratch.
• Help the studio get smarter with each AI product by capturing what we learn about review, correction, approval, uncertainty, failure states, and user trust, and sharing it so each new venture starts sharper than the last.

In your first few months, you will have:

• Stepped into an active venture, understood the product direction quickly, and identified the first design moves that would reduce risk, test key…