Principal Product Designer

Overview

We re growing our Product Design organization to support a strategic evolution: from a suite of point solutions into an integrated ELD platform. Design is at the center of this shift. As we connect compliance, instruction, and assessment into unified workflows, we need designers who can define what the experience should be, not just what it looks like and shape solutions that feel like one coherent system, not a collection of tools.

We re looking for an experienced Principal Product Designer who can lead UX strategy and evolve our systems. This role blends systems thinking, cross-R&D design leadership, and setting the bar for AI-assisted design workflows across the team. It  a hands-on role as well. You ll work across the product suite and collaborate closely with senior Product and Engineering peers to define strategy and execute to improve our design system (Backpack).

This is a hybrid role based out of our headquarters in Boston, MA.

We are organized into small, durable product teams that develop solutions in specific domains. Our teams are cross-functional—product, design, and engineering work so closely together that we call ourselves Dev Pro and rarely meet in functional silos. We focus on outcomes over output, which means we engage users early, validate hypotheses through research and prototyping, and iterate rapidly toward high-confidence solutions.

While we work in separate teams, we prioritize integration and consistency of our solutions meaning consistency isn  a nice to have, it  a critical part of our end goal. We expect designers to integrate AI tools into their workflows as on-demand collaborators that can help explore ideas quickly: generating variations, stress-testing concepts, and moving from problem to prototype faster than traditional methods allow.

This isn  about replacing craft; it  about using AI to expand what  possible within a time constraint. You  be evaluated on what you  able to produce with these tools, not just your manual output. We value Product Designers who think strategically and are able to look at problems from multiple angles, weigh tradeoffs, and articulate how a solution meets the needs of both users and the business.

We celebrate accountability to outcomes: conducting experiments, adjusting strategy based on learnings, and delivering products that change behavior and drive real value.

Within 1 month, you will:

• Build a clear picture of the strategic context facing Ellevation and what role design plays. Audit Backpack s current state and identify gaps.
• Build relationships with Design team as well as Product and Engineering leadership. Understand team rituals, skill levels, and workflow patterns across designers.

Within 3 months, you will:

• Own the roadmap for Backpack s evolution. Ship improvements that address high-priority gaps.
• Establish yourself as the go-to for cross-team UX decisions. Begin identifying opportunities to raise craft and improve design workflows across the team.

Within 6 months, you will:

• Backpack is actively enabling integrated experiencesam
  
  S are using it to ship faster and more consistently.
• You  shaping UX strategy for initiatives that span multiple teams.
• You  mentoring designers and elevating the quality bar through feedback and process improvements.

Within 12 months, you will:

• You  materially improved how design works at Ellevation.
• Backpack is a competitive advantage. You  a trusted voice in R&D strategy conversations, and the team  craft and AI fluency have measurably improved under your influence.

• You have 10+ years of demonstrated success as a cross-functional designer in a B2B SaaS or adjacent environment.
• You ve owned or significantly shaped a design system and understand the tradeoffs between flexibility and consistency.
• You re comfortable working autonomously, setting your own direction, and influencing without authority.
• You re AI-fluent using LLM-assisted prototyping to accelerate ideation and validation, freeing you to focus on strategy and systems thinking.
• You re accountable to outcomes, not just output. You run experiments, learn from what ships, and measure success by whether the product changes behavior.
• You go to the source. You ve led user research and usability testing in the field, and you don  design from assumptions.
• You seek feedback and confront hard truths. Craft is a practice, not a credentialnd you iterate with users, engineers, and data.
• You bring diverse perspectives into your process and design with empathy for users unlike yourself.
• You think in systems, creating coherent experiences across workflows rather than isolated features.
• You elevate others through feedback, pairing, and raising the bar on what good looks like.

• Boston-area preferred
• New England-area employees will be expected to travel to Boston for 2 days a month 10x a year.

$160,000 - $220,000 a year. Ellevation is transparent about its approach to pay which includes a competitive base salary,…