Product Design Intern

Plasiv is building an AI digital solution that helps manufacturing teams plan, study, balance, and improve production lines. We’re replacing fragmented tools, spreadsheets, and legacy software with one connected system built for how modern teams actually work.

Our products are used to make complex, high-stakes operational decisions. That means the design problems are rarely simple, but the experience should be.

We’re looking for a Product Design Intern to help us make that happen.

Role Overview

You’ll work at the intersection of product design, AI interaction design, and rapid prototyping, helping shape complex product experiences from early ideas through implementation.

You’ll work directly with our designer, founder, and engineers. You’ll contribute to core areas of the product, explore new AI interactions, improve our design system, and help turn ambiguous problems into clear, polished experiences.

The ideal candidate is curious, hands-on, comfortable with code, and excited by complex software. You should be able to take a product problem, understand the system around it, reason through the UX, and quickly make something the team can react to.

This is a high-impact internship for someone who wants genuine influence over what we build, how it works, and how it feels. You won’t be doing busywork, and your work won’t disappear into a concept folder. You’ll help design things that ship.

What You’ll Do

• Design polished product experiences across core areas of the Plasiv platform.

• Contribute to features end-to-end, from research and workflow mapping to prototyping, high-fidelity design, implementation, and iteration.

• Explore AI-native interactions involving recommendations, automation, explainability, system feedback, and human control.

• Work closely with the founding product designer, founders, and engineers from the earliest product conversations, not downstream of them.

• Use prototypes to think, communicate, test ideas, and move product decisions forward.

• Contribute to our design system, component library, visual language, and reusable interaction patterns.

• Learn from real customer usage and continue improving experiences after they ship.

What You Bring

• You’re currently pursuing or have recently completed a degree in Product Design, HCI, Interaction Design, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• A strong portfolio that shows how you solve difficult UX problems, not only your final screens.

• Strong interaction and visual design skills, with proficiency in Figma.

• Experience working with design systems, reusable components, variants, and component-based product thinking.

• Comfort with code and an understanding of how digital products are built. You don’t need to be a front-end engineer, but code shouldn’t feel like a mysterious black box.

• Clear communication and a willingness to share early, receive feedback, and keep improving.

Bonus Points

• Experience with React, TypeScript, HTML/CSS, Tailwind, or similar frontend technologies.

• Previous experience at a startup or on a small, fast-moving product team.

• An AI product, technical platform, developer tool, or complex systems project in your portfolio.

• Experience prototyping with tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or other AI-assisted building tools.

• Skills in motion design, data visualization, information architecture, or user research.

Internship Details

• Duration: Three months

• Location: San Jose, California

• Work arrangement: In-person is strongly preferred

• Potential: There may be opportunities to continue working with Plasiv depending on performance and mutual fit

How We Work

Speed matters at Plasiv because learning matters.

We share work early, test ideas quickly, and improve them as we learn. We care deeply about quality, but we don’t wait for perfect conditions before making progress.

Design, engineering, and product decisions happen together. You’ll be part of the conversations where the product is shaped, working alongside the people building it and the founders setting its direction.

You won’t always receive a neat brief with every answer included. Sometimes you’ll start with a customer problem, a rough idea, or a workflow no one has fully untangled yet. Your job is to ask good questions, make the problem visible, explore possibilities, and help the team find the right answer through making.

We’re ambitious, direct, collaborative, and serious about the work without taking ourselves too seriously.