Director, AI Design & Experience (San Francisco) Job at Accordion in San Francis

Director, AI Design & Experience

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We are the better way to work in finance. As private equitys value creation partner, we sit at the heart of PEwhere sponsors and CFOs meet. Through financial consulting rooted in data, technology, and AI, we help clients drive valuesupporting the office of the CFO to drive endtoend value creation.

If you crave challenging work and are looking to grow, come solve complex issues alongside 1,400+ finance & technology experts in a supportive, collaborative environment.

Backed by premier private equity firms and headquartered in New York with 10 offices around the globe, we are a highgrowth, entrepreneurial firm looking for people who want to be part of building something great. Come make your mark.

About the Role And You

Were looking for a designer who understands that AI changes everything about how humans interact with software, and especially is obsessed with getting those interactions right. You wont be adding chatbots to existing interfaces. Youll be reimagining whats possible when intelligence is embedded into every touchpoint.

This role sits at the intersection of design, AI, advanced data analytics, and product strategy. Youll work handinhand with our Accordion Intelligence Lab (a team of expert software engineers building the AI capabilities that power our solutions) translating complex model outputs into experiences that feel intuitive, trustworthy, and genuinely useful to finance professionals who dont have time for friction.

What Youll Do

Youll define the design language for AInative experiences across Accordions solution portfolio. This means moving beyond traditional UI patterns to create new interaction paradigms: how users prompt and guide AI systems, how they interpret and validate AIgenerated insights, how they maintain appropriate oversight without drowning in alerts, and how they build trust in outputs they cant fully verify themselves.

Your daytoday will involve deep collaboration with engineers building LLMpowered features, RAG systems, and agentic workflows. Youll prototype rapidly, test with real users, and iterate based on what you learn about how finance professionals actually want to work with AI. Youll establish design principles and patterns that scale across products while remaining flexible enough to evolve as AI capabilities advance.

Youll own the endtoend experience strategy for AI interactions: from firsttime onboarding that builds user confidence, to progressive disclosure of AI capabilities, to graceful handling of uncertainty and errors. Youll think deeply about when AI should act autonomously versus when it should ask for guidance, and design the interfaces that make those handoffs seamless.

Travel to client sites as needed.

What Were Looking For

The AINative Mindset: Youve been designing for AI long enough to have strong opinions about what works and what doesnt. You understand the unique challenges of AI interfaces: uncertainty, latency, explainability, trust calibration and have developed approaches to address them. Youre thinking about copilots, agents, and multimodal interactions, not just chat windows.

The Technical Fluency: You can have substantive conversations with ML engineers about model capabilities and limitations. You understand enough about LLMs, embeddings, retrieval systems, and agent architectures to design experiences that work with these technologies rather than against them. Youve seen how prompt design affects UX and vice versa.

The Craft Excellence: Your visual and interaction design skills are exceptional. You can take complex, datadense financial workflows and make them elegant. You prototype at high fidelity and can articulate the reasoning behind every design decision. Youve built and maintained design systems that scale.

The Research Rigor: You ground your designs in real user behavior. You know how to run effective user research with busy professionals, extract actionable insights, and translate findings into design improvements. You measure the success of your work and iterate accordingly.

The Strategic Influence: You can advocate for design at the leadership level and shape product direction. You build strong partnerships with product, engineering, and business stakeholders. You know how to make the case for design investments and demonstrate their impact.

Requirements

• 8+ years of product design experience, with 3+ years focused on AIpowered or dataintensive applications
• Demonstrated portfolio of AI/ML interface design showing sophisticated approaches to humanAI interaction
• Deep experience with design systems, prototyping tools (Figma, Framer, or equivalent), and frontend collaboration
• Track record of shipping AI features that users actually adopt and value
• Strong user research skills and evidencebased design practice
• Excellent communication skills with both technical and executive audiences

Ideal Background

You might come from a product design leadership role at a company pushing the boundaries of AI interaction, a design agency doing cuttingedge AI work, or a startup where you owned the entire design experience for AInative products. What matters most is that youve wrestled with the hard problems of humanAI interaction and have the portfolio to prove it.

Bonus points if youve designed for enterprise finance, CFO tools, or other highstakes professional contexts where accuracy and trust are paramount.

What Success Looks Like

In your first year, youll have established Accordions AI design language and shipped it across multiple products. Youll have built a research practice that continuously informs how we design AI experiences. Youll be the person our AI Lab turns to when they need to figure out how a new capability should actually work for usersand the person our clients reference when they talk about why Accordions AI feels different from everyone elses.

Compensation

The annual salary for this role ranges from: $170,000 to $225,000 USD + benefits + bonus. Actual compensation packages are determined by evaluating a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to geographic location, skill set, years and depth of experience, education, certifications, cost of labor and internal equity.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Accordion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

Recruiting Policy

Please note that as per Accordion policy, we do not accept unsolicited resumes from thirdparty recruiters unless such recruiters are engaged to provide candidates for a specified opening and in alignment with our inclusive diversity values. Any employment agency, person or entity that submits an unsolicited resume does so with the understanding that Accordion will have the right to hire that applicant at its discretion without any fee owed to the submitting employment agency, person or entity.

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