Product Designer

Position: Staff Product Designer

Job Title: Sr. Product Designer

Team: Product

Location: Onsite - Sawtelle (Between Santa Monica & West LA) or San Francisco, CA

Employment Type: Full-time

Reports To: SVP, Product & Technology

About Plug Plug is an automotive fintech startup building the marketplace for electric vehicles. Consumers, dealers, and commercial partners trade in, sell, and auction used EVs through a platform built exclusively for electric, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.

Consumers can get an instant cash offer in minutes, backed by data-driven pricing, battery state-of-health analysis, with pickup, payment, and title transfer handled end-to-end. Franchise and independent dealers across the United States bid in real time on inventory sourced directly from these consumers, dealers, and commercial partners. The result is a single platform that gives sellers a fast, fair exit and gives dealers a dedicated channel for sourcing used EV inventory.

Founded in 2023 and led by former Tesla executives, Plug has facilitated $100M in EV sales since launch and is backed by a $20M Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners. We're building the most AI-native startup team in Los Angeles, full of operators, engineers, and ML researchers laying the transaction rails for the used EV market's exponential growth.

Why Plug

• You'll own a piece of the biggest infrastructure opportunity in automotive.
• You'll work on a platform built exclusively for EVs, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.
• You'll be part of an AI-native company. We're rethinking how work gets done at a fundamental level.
• You'll work directly with operators who have scaled multi-billion dollar businesses in automotive, EV, and marketplaces.
• You'll have real ownership, high autonomy, and a direct line to company outcomes.

The Opportunity We are looking for a Product Designer to own design across Plug, from the consumer selling experience through the dealer and partner tools. You will report to the SVP of Product and Technology.

This is a senior individual contributor role. You will own your surface end-to-end, paired closely with product and engineering, operating with high agency. You talk to customers directly, form a point of view, and ship. You will not wait on a committee or a process. Most of the value you create will come from how well you understand the people using what you build.

You will also set the bar. We move fast, and AI is a real part of how we work - which means the risk isn't velocity, it's sameness. We're looking for someone who uses every tool available to help the team ship quickly and on target, and who also knows which moments deserve soul and will fight for them.

What You'll Do

• Own end-to-end design for our OEM, commercial partner, and dealer-facing surfaces, from early concept through shipped, polished product.
• Set the bar for taste and craft across Plug. You'll be the standard the company calibrates against.
• Define how we build. You'll design the systems that let design scale - our design system, prototyping and handoff workflows, and how we use tools like Claude Design - so a small team ships fast without drifting from our brand, our craft bar, or what customers actually need.
• Lead customer research directly - interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing - to build a deep, first-hand understanding of how partners and dealers actually work.
• Bring a curious, AI-forward mindset - you understand how product, engineering, and design work together in an AI-native workflow.
• Help empower teams to move fast with AI while maintaining strong design governance.
• Translate complex B2B workflows (inventory processing, bidding, API-driven integrations) into interfaces that are simple, fast, and trustworthy for professional daily use.
• Drive innovation in how the team works with AI, not just what gets designed.
• Empower teams to design independently, with you as the final say and taste-maker for the org.
• Scale yourself through AI-forward operations, working closely with product and engineering.
• Partner closely with product managers and engineers from problem framing through delivery, not just handoff - you're in the room for the trade-offs.
• Design and iterate based on real usage data, session replays, and experiment results, alongside qualitative research.
• Represent the voice of the customer in roadmap and prioritization discussions, backed by evidence, not opinion.
• Work directly with high-value external partners (OEMs and commercial accounts) to understand their workflows and constraints.

What…