Head of Product Design

Head Of Product Design

Brooklyn, NY

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.

The Opportunity at Altana

Altana's mission is to fix globalization. We are building a network that brings together public and private sector entities, across myriad workflows from customs and transaction processing, to macro policy analysis, to supply chain resilience. Combined with the age of agents and AI native experience this isn't something the SaaS playbook has prepared us for. As Head of Design you will shape the product vision of Altana and bring it to life.

You will create a consistent, agent-first design system for handling a wide array of information-dense, complex workflows across governments, logistics providers, importers, and their suppliers across a range of use cases.

And you need to lean into the evolving role of product design in an AI-native software development lifecycle. Traditional design organizations are not set up for this world. They scale linearly with headcount, ship Figma files to engineers as the unit of work, treat the design system as a component library, and assume the user is a single human clicking through a single product.

That model is already breaking. Product managers can prototype in working code. Engineers can generate full interfaces from a prompt. Customers increasingly interact with the product through an agent that reasons, summarizes, and acts on their behalf. The center of gravity for how experiences get made is shifting — and the design organizations that thrive next will not be the ones that draw the most screens.

Our head of design is expected to help us create this new world and evolve traditional SDLC's to tighten the feedback loop, and produce more output faster together in a native AI loop.

We are looking for a Head of Design to build Altana's design organization for that world from the ground up: an agent-first design team whose primary deliverable is not a static mockup but a living design system — a structured, semantic, machine-readable language of patterns, components, primitives, and interaction grammars that PMs, engineers, and AI agents can compose against to ship coherent, on-brand, high-quality experiences without a designer in the critical path of every screen.

You will redefine what it means to design an in-product experience when the user on the other side is sometimes a customs broker, sometimes a Fortune 500 trade compliance team, sometimes a sovereign government analyst, and increasingly, sometimes an AI agent acting on their behalf. You will treat AI not as a feature you bolt onto the UI but as a native participant in every workflow — with its own surfaces, affordances, failure modes, and trust signals — and you will build the design language that makes human-and-agent collaboration feel obvious instead of awkward.

This is a role for a leader who is as much a product thinker as a design thinker. You will sit at the same table as the product leaders, the CPO, CTO, CEO and Head of Engineering, set strategy alongside them, and own outcomes — not just artifacts.

• Define what an agent-first design team looks like in practice — how it's structured, what it ships, what it measures, and how it scales with leverage rather than headcount.
• Hire, develop, and lead a team of designers who treat AI as a teammate and a medium: who prototype in code with AI assistance, who design with agents rather than around them, and who see the design system as the team's highest-leverage product.
• Establish the rituals, review forums, and quality bars that keep a small team of designers accountable for the experience of a multi-product, multi-persona network — without becoming the bottleneck that slows it down.
• Champion a culture of "show, don't tell": working prototypes, agent-generated variants, and live demos beat decks and static comps every time.

• Own the vision for Altana's design system as the enablement layer for a new class of creators —…