Principal Product Designer, Emerging Agents

Adobe•San Jose, CA

About The Position

The opportunity We are seeking a Principal Designer to define the future of human–AI collaboration across Adobe’s ecosystem. This role focuses on agentic systems operating across complex creative and enterprise workflows. You will shape the interaction paradigms that govern delegation, control, evaluation, and trust. This is a systems design role focused on AI behavior, orchestration, and adaptive interfaces. We are looking for a designer who works directly with models, prototypes in code, and treats AI systems as a design material. What you’ll do This role demands a systems thinker operating across strategy and implementation. You will define interaction paradigms, prototype AI behaviors, and align research, engineering, and design around a coherent vision.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in product, systems, or interaction design.
Demonstrated experience defining and shipping AI-native or agent-based systems.
Experience designing for creative tools or deep familiarity with creative workflows and processes.
Deep systems thinking with experience designing platforms or complex workflows.
Hands-on experience working with large language models and designing adaptive or generative interfaces, including dynamic UI, tool selection, and orchestration layers.
Comfort prototyping in code and contributing production-quality implementations alongside engineering teams.
Experience driving cross-functional alignment on ambiguous, emerging technology initiatives.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing enterprise AI workflows.
Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns.
Experience integrating first- and third-party AI systems.
Background in automation design, developer tooling, or platform ecosystems.
Accessibility expertise in AI-driven interfaces.
Experience designing accessible and inclusive interfaces for people with disabilities.
Understanding of applying WCAG conformance criteria in design, specifically testing comps, wireframes, and prototypes for accessibility standards.
Accessibility certifications CPACC, WAS, CPWA, or ADS from the IAAP preferred.
You think in behaviors, systems, and capabilities, not just screens, flows, and features.
You treat AI systems as a design material.
You’ve built AI workflows or agent prototypes and understand how model behavior shifts under constraint, how tools are invoked, and how memory and guardrails shape outcomes.
You are energized by ambiguity.
Designing agentic systems means working with emergent behavior and evolving systems. Rather than waiting for clarity, you create it through prototypes and collaboration with research and engineering.
You are opinionated about the future of AI-native workflows and excited to help shape new ways of working.
Most importantly, you believe AI should expand human creativity and capability.
You design systems that empower people, not replace them.

Responsibilities

Define New Interaction Paradigms for Agentic Systems
Establish mental models for delegation, collaboration, and control between humans and AI agents.
Design interaction frameworks for multi-step workflows and tool-using systems.
Define how users inspect reasoning, guide autonomous behavior, and balance prompt-based and structured interaction.
Design for Trust, Transparency & Evaluation
Create mechanisms that make AI reasoning legible, including confidence indicators, provenance, and evaluation UX.
Design failure recovery and escalation models.
Contribute to guardrails that balance capability with safety.
Prototype AI-Native Experiences
Work directly with large language models and agent frameworks.
Write and refine prompts, skills, system instructions, and behavioral constraints to shape system behavior.
Prototype using code, scripting, or AI tooling.
Rapidly iterate through build → test → refine cycles in close partnership with research and engineering.
Shape Context-Aware & Brand-Aware Systems
Design systems that understand creative context, enterprise constraints, memory, and personalization.
Contribute to the evolution of AI-native components within Adobe’s design system.
Drive Strategic & Org-Level Impact
Influence senior leadership through compelling system visions and working prototypes.
Align cross-functional teams around AI interaction strategy.
Mentor designers working in emerging AI spaces and elevate the craft of behavior design across the organization.