From the listing
About the role
Over 9,000 companies — from scrappy startups to global brands — use Customer.io to send billions of emails, push notifications, in-app messages, and SMS every day. Customer.io powers automated communication that people actually want to receive using real-time behavioral data.
Principal Product Designer is the highest individual contributor design role at Customer.io. This person shapes the design vision for the company and influences how design is practiced through their craft, standards, and partnerships with product and engineering leadership.
Customer.io is executing against a strong current product while redesigning what the product is and how it's experienced by a new generation of builders. This is not a management role, but a leadership role with company-wide influence.
What you'll do
- Shape and communicate a design vision for Customer.io's product as a whole — the coherent, long-range picture of what excellent looks like for customers.
- Drive the strategic direction of Pluma, the design system — architecture, evolution, deprecation decisions, and the principles that govern how it scales.
- Close the gap between design intent and shipped product — stay close to implementation to catch divergence, and fix it directly when code is the right tool.
- Design for builder and developer audiences — CLI-native flows, API-first onboarding, and interfaces built for people who type before they click.
- Lead the design of agentic and human-AI surfaces across the product — develop the philosophy and advocate for the standards.
- Partner with product and engineering leadership on product strategy, bringing design into the conversation before direction is set.
- Develop and advocate for Customer.io's AI product design philosophy as a framework the whole team builds from.
- Lead design review for major initiatives and bring accountability for quality and coherence across what ships.
- Develop Staff designers through direct mentorship, critique, and the clarity of your own example.
- Contribute to hiring and calibration — assess candidates and help the team develop a shared language for what excellent looks like.
What they're looking for
- 10+ years of product design experience with a portfolio demonstrating design vision and organizational impact, not just individual craft.
- Track record of shaping design direction at the company level — influenced what gets built and why, not just how it looks.
- Experience designing for developer and builder audiences — CLI, API-first onboarding, or infrastructure-native products.
- Developed point of view on AI and agentic product design — has shipped AI-native interfaces and can articulate a philosophy on interaction models for agentic and delegated use.
- Contributed to a design system at the strategic level — shaped what it should be and shouldn't be, and advocated for those decisions over time.
- Track record of aligning product, engineering, and executive leadership around a design direction without a management title.
- Has raised the craft bar at an organizational level through critique culture, standards, and example.
- Executive-level communication — connects design decisions to customer impact, product differentiation, and business outcomes.
- B2B SaaS depth — understands complex, data-heavy products and has opinions about where the interaction model breaks.
- Leads through clarity and example, gives candid feedback, and operates with humility and curiosity even outside their own expertise.
- All final candidates must complete a background check and employment verifications.
From the company page
Customer.io benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“As a fully remote company, we don't have any requirements for where you live (wherever makes you happiest!)”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on Customer.io
They have a very solid careers page, clear perks package, and even a map...I'm such a sucker for a map. What I want MORE of is a better explanation of their remote work policy, and hiring location policies. Put it on my wishlist, please! Help me get you out there to our readers! I particularly like their async work culture that tries to keep meetings to a minimum (a HUGE plus from me). I also really like their extensive perk and benefit package (see below for full list). Make sure to take a look at their careers page, it's extensive!
✔️ Note that Customer.io's Glassdoor score has increased from 3.3 to 3.8. Don't put all your stock in GD reviews, but use them as an indicator.