Staff Product Designer
nTop, New York, NY, United States
Overview
Engineering teams in aerospace and defense, industrial energy, turbomachinery, and high-performance automotive use nTop to explore design spaces and optimize performance at a scale traditional CAD can't support, compressing months of iteration into hours. We're a growth-stage company with deep roots in computational geometry, and we're at an inflection point in how our product works and what it needs to become. What You'll Do
Own the product's design architecture. Define the interaction primitives, conceptual models, and design principles that govern how users understand and work within nTop, across the existing workstation product and the new surfaces being built. Set cross-product design direction. Identify systemic inconsistencies and opportunities before they become entrenched, and drive alignment across product management and software engineering. Work the problem with the people closest to it. Partner with our forward-deployed field engineering team, who work directly with customers on real programs, and our UX researcher to identify the friction points that most affect users and our business. Define how AI capabilities reach users. At nTop, AI means physics-surrogate models, generative geometry workflows, and engineering knowledge systems. Define the interaction patterns that make these capabilities useful and interpretable in practice. Establish the design foundation. As the sole designer on the product team, create the design system, principles, and documentation that the software engineering organization can build against, and that future designers can build on. Partner with product and technology leadership. Work directly with the VP of Product and CTO on roadmap decisions and architectural trade-offs. What We're Looking For
8+ years of product design experience on complex, expert-grade software, including engineering tools, developer platforms, data or simulation systems, or equivalent. Demonstrated staff-level scope: you have owned design systems or platform architecture, not just features, and can point to organizational impact from decisions that outlasted your direct involvement. Systems thinker: skilled at designing abstractions, states, and constraints that remain coherent and extensible as the product grows. Strong information architecture instincts for expert users in constraint-heavy, precision workflows. Able to build alignment without formal authority, across software engineering, product management, and executive leadership, through clarity, craft, and well-reasoned argument. Comfortable in technical depth. You don't need to write code, but you need to participate as a peer in conversations about architecture, performance, and trade-offs. Familiarity with computational design, parametric modeling, visual programming, or physics-based simulation is a strong plus. Experience designing for AI-assisted workflows, including interaction patterns for uncertainty, model transparency, and human override. Why nTop
This is a role with real weight: you'll rebuild and lead our design function, with direct influence over the full product experience and a seat at the table for strategic decisions. Our users are engineers solving hard problems in demanding industries. The work is technically serious and the stakes are real. This role is based in New York and reports to the VP of Product. Compensation: $180,000-200,000 annually plus options and benefits
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Engineering teams in aerospace and defense, industrial energy, turbomachinery, and high-performance automotive use nTop to explore design spaces and optimize performance at a scale traditional CAD can't support, compressing months of iteration into hours. We're a growth-stage company with deep roots in computational geometry, and we're at an inflection point in how our product works and what it needs to become. What You'll Do
Own the product's design architecture. Define the interaction primitives, conceptual models, and design principles that govern how users understand and work within nTop, across the existing workstation product and the new surfaces being built. Set cross-product design direction. Identify systemic inconsistencies and opportunities before they become entrenched, and drive alignment across product management and software engineering. Work the problem with the people closest to it. Partner with our forward-deployed field engineering team, who work directly with customers on real programs, and our UX researcher to identify the friction points that most affect users and our business. Define how AI capabilities reach users. At nTop, AI means physics-surrogate models, generative geometry workflows, and engineering knowledge systems. Define the interaction patterns that make these capabilities useful and interpretable in practice. Establish the design foundation. As the sole designer on the product team, create the design system, principles, and documentation that the software engineering organization can build against, and that future designers can build on. Partner with product and technology leadership. Work directly with the VP of Product and CTO on roadmap decisions and architectural trade-offs. What We're Looking For
8+ years of product design experience on complex, expert-grade software, including engineering tools, developer platforms, data or simulation systems, or equivalent. Demonstrated staff-level scope: you have owned design systems or platform architecture, not just features, and can point to organizational impact from decisions that outlasted your direct involvement. Systems thinker: skilled at designing abstractions, states, and constraints that remain coherent and extensible as the product grows. Strong information architecture instincts for expert users in constraint-heavy, precision workflows. Able to build alignment without formal authority, across software engineering, product management, and executive leadership, through clarity, craft, and well-reasoned argument. Comfortable in technical depth. You don't need to write code, but you need to participate as a peer in conversations about architecture, performance, and trade-offs. Familiarity with computational design, parametric modeling, visual programming, or physics-based simulation is a strong plus. Experience designing for AI-assisted workflows, including interaction patterns for uncertainty, model transparency, and human override. Why nTop
This is a role with real weight: you'll rebuild and lead our design function, with direct influence over the full product experience and a seat at the table for strategic decisions. Our users are engineers solving hard problems in demanding industries. The work is technically serious and the stakes are real. This role is based in New York and reports to the VP of Product. Compensation: $180,000-200,000 annually plus options and benefits
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