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.

What You'll Do

Build an Agent-First Design Organization

• 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.

Make the Design System the Product

• Own the vision for Altana's design system as the enablement layer for a new class of creators — product managers, engineers, and AI agents — who increasingly build user-facing experiences directly.
• Define the system as more than a component library: a structured set of patterns, tokens, content rules, interaction grammars, and accessibility guarantees that are semantic, composable, and legible to AI — so that an LLM generating a workflow, a PM prototyping a new view, or an engineer wiring up a feature all converge on the same coherent experience.
• Build the contribution model, the documentation, and the tooling (including AI-native authoring and review tools) that make the design system the fastest, easiest, and highest-quality path to ship — not a checklist people work around.
• Measure the design system by leverage: how many net-new experiences shipped without direct designer involvement still meet the bar; how fast new patterns propagate; how much rework the system prevents.

Design Agent-Native In-Product Experiences

• Evolve Altana's in-product experience from a set of human-only workflows to genuinely agent-native workflows — where agents act, explain, ask, and hand off to humans, and humans confirm, correct, escalate, and delegate back.
• Define the visual and interaction language for the new primitives this requires: agent reasoning surfaces, provenance and citation patterns, confidence and uncertainty signals, interruption and consent moments, multi-step task previews, human-in-the-loop review queues, and the affordances that let a user trust — or appropriately distrust — what an agent has done on their behalf.
• Partner with product and engineering to make agentic capability discoverable inside the existing product, not hidden behind a separate "AI" tab — so that the right capability shows up at the right step of the workflow, for the right persona.
• Treat every agent surface as a first-class design problem: what it looks like when it's working, what it looks like when it's wrong, and how a user moves between agent-mediated and direct-manipulation modes without losing their place.

Design Across a Multi-Product, Multi-Persona Network

• Own the end-to-end design strategy for a product suite that spans enterprise supply chain mapping, customs and entry management, PLM/ERP integration, government and regulatory tooling, logistics provider workflows, and financial services use cases — all converging on a single network experience.
• Design for personas that share objects but not mental models: a corporate trade compliance officer, a licensed customs broker, a CBP officer, a logistics dispatcher, a supplier in a developing market, and an AI agent acting for any of them — collaborating around the same Product Passport, the same shipment, the same risk signal.
• Build a design system that is opinionated about coherence but flexible about persona — one navigation, one visual language, one set of patterns — modulated by role, surface, and use case rather than forked into product-specific silos.
• Make collaboration a first-class design surface: shared workspaces, handoffs across organizations, comments and approvals that cross enterprise/broker/government boundaries, and the trust and access patterns that make those interactions safe.

Lead as a Product Thinker, Not Just a Design Thinker

• Operate as a peer to Product, Engineering, and Data Science leadership: shape strategy, make trade-offs, own outcomes against business and network metrics — not just craft and aesthetics.
• Tie design investment directly to the metrics that matter for a network business: activation, time-to-value, workflow completion, multi-party adoption, network k-factor, and product-led expansion across personas and organizations.
• Lead customer research and discovery as a strategic capability — not a service function — and use what you learn to influence what gets built, not just how it looks.
• Translate design vision into a clear, compelling narrative that aligns the executive team, the board, customers, and prospective hires around why design is a competitive moat for Altana.

Partner Across the Company

• Partner deeply with Engineering on the design-to-code pipeline: shared primitives, AI-assisted generation, automated accessibility and visual regression, and a contribution model where front-end engineers extend the system as a matter of course.
• Partner with Product on roadmap and discovery — designing in the open with prototypes, not gating it behind handoff rituals.
• Partner with Customer Experience, Marketing, and Sales to ensure that the product experience, the documentation that AI agents consume, and the way Altana communicates change all speak in one coherent voice.

Who You Are

You think in systems, not screens. You don't just want to design great surfaces — you want to design the system that produces great surfaces at scale, in the hands of people who don't have "designer" in their title. You see the design system as your team's highest-leverage product and you have built one that was actually used as such.

You're agent-native, not AI-curious. You actively use AI tools to do your own work — to research, prototype, generate variants, critique, and ship. You have opinions about what agent-native UX looks like, formed by building it, not by reading about it. You're not waiting for "the AI design wave" — you've been on it for a while, and you have the receipts.

You're a product thinker as much as a design thinker. You can sit in a strategy session and make a credible case for what to build and why, not only how. You understand business and network metrics, can read a usage funnel, and hold yourself accountable to outcomes — activation, adoption, retention, expansion — not just to craft and aesthetics.

You design for many users at once. You're comfortable optimizing a single design system across radically different personas — enterprise compliance officers, government regulators, brokers, suppliers, agents — who all collaborate inside the same network experience. You know how to keep an experience coherent without flattening the differences between the people using it.

You're a builder, not just a leader. You can still prototype. You still review the work. You still write the principles. You build leverage for your team by raising the floor of the design system, not by becoming a bottleneck above it.

You're technically fluent. You don't need to ship production code, but you're comfortable in the materials of the modern web: CSS, React, design tokens, component APIs, accessibility primitives, and the AI tools that increasingly sit between a design intent and a shipped pixel. You can have a real conversation with engineering about how the system is implemented, not just how it looks.

You communicate with clarity and conviction. You can present design strategy to a CEO, a customer, a board, a prospective hire, and a junior designer — and each of them walks away aligned. You write as well as you draw.

You're energized by hard problems and high stakes. Altana's design surface — a multi-product, multi-persona, agent-native network that mediates real-world global trade — is one of the more interesting design challenges in enterprise software today. You see that as a feature, not a bug.

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in product or UX design, including 4+ years leading design organizations in complex, multi-product B2B or enterprise SaaS environments.
• A portfolio that demonstrates ownership of a design system — not just a set of screens — that was actively used by non-designers (engineers, PMs, and ideally AI tooling) to ship production experiences.
• Demonstrated experience designing AI-mediated or agentic in-product experiences — including the patterns for trust, provenance, confidence, human-in-the-loop review, and graceful failure.
• Experience designing across multiple personas and organizations that share workflows — collaborative SaaS, multi-sided platforms, marketplaces, or network products.
• Strong product instincts: comfortable owning outcomes against business and network metrics (activation, time-to-value, adoption, k-factor, PQLs), not just design quality metrics.
• Hands-on fluency with modern AI tools as part of your own design and prototyping practice — using them to generate, critique, prototype, and accelerate, not just to admire.
• Technical fluency with the design-to-code surface: tokens, component APIs, CSS, React (or willingness to learn), accessibility standards, and the tooling that connects design systems to production code.
• Experience designing data-dense, decision-support, or analytical experiences — supply chain visualizations, knowledge graphs, dashboards, regulatory workflows — is a strong plus.
• Experience in a high-growth, zero-to-one environment where you had to build the design organization while running it.

US Salary Range and Benefits

$240,000 – $300,000 USD

The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual base salary for the position. The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Guideline 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and/or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses.

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.