Product Design Lead Jobs in San Francisco, CA

About Rippling

Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.4B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes. We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @Rippling.com addresses.

About The Role

Nearly half of the U.S. workforce is hourly: healthcare workers, retail associates, manufacturing teams, restaurant staff, and more. These are the people who keep the world running, and serving them is one of Rippling’s largest and most important bets. Hourly workforce management is deceptively complex. Behind every schedule, shift change, timecard, break rule, and approval flow is a dense web of compliance requirements, business context, operational constraints, and real human impact. The work is not abstract: the product decisions we make affect people’s pay, hours, routines, and trust in their employer. That is exactly why AI is such a powerful design challenge here: it can help admins move faster, understand complexity, and make better decisions. How do you keep AI features transparent and grounded as policies, exceptions, and edge cases stack up? How do you design oversight so admins feel in control, not out of the loop? For consequential actions, what is the right checkpoint between automation and human judgment? As a designer on this team, you will work on some of Rippling’s most important product problems. You will define ambiguous opportunities, shape product direction, prototype deeply, and own outcome from end-to-end. Designers at Rippling are product builders, and AI is part of how we build: from early thinking to prototyping to what ships to customers.

What You Will Do

- Design exceptional product experiences for modern workforce management across forecasting, scheduling, time and attendance, team communication, and the operational workflows that connect them.
- Get close to customers to understand how managers and admins actually run hourly teams: where workflows break, where complexity hides, and where better design can drive real business impact.
- Design scalable capabilities and platform patterns that work for multiple products, customer segments, and use cases, creating coherent experiences across Rippling’s broader platform.
- Use AI as a core part of your design process to clarify problem spaces, generate and refine requirements, explore edge cases, and pressure-test solutions before they reach production.
- Prototype with AI-assisted tools to make ideas tangible quickly, explore realistic interactions, and validate solutions through working flows rather than static mocks alone.
- Develop a hands-on understanding of evolving AI capabilities by building with it, and bringing the knowledge into your product and design decisions.

What You Will Need

- 6+ years of end-to-end product design experience, with a portfolio demonstrating systems design and complex product delivery.
- Active use of LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, or similar) in your design workflow, whether for research, requirements, copy, or exploration.
- Comfort with AI-assisted prototyping tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or similar), even if you're not writing production code.
- A strong eye for craft, both interaction and visual, with the ability to set a high bar and drive quality across teams.
- A relentless customer focus and desire to dig deep to understand real user needs and translate them into design decisions that solve real problems.
- Exceptional communication skills, making abstract concepts understandable and guiding cross-functional partners through tough decisions.

Additional Information

Rippling is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected characteristics. Rippling is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities who need assistance during the hiring process. To request a reasonable accommodation, please email accommodations@rippling.com.

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role. This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here. A variety of factors are considered when determining someone’s compensation–including a candidate’s professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.

The pay range for this role is: 153,000 - 255,000 USD per year (US Tier 1)