Product Design Lead, Platform Tools

About the role

At Rippling, Design is central to our mission to free smart people to tackle hard problems. We build products that automate the operational complexity of running a business — from HR and payroll to IT and finance — so our customers can focus on what matters most. In a world of fragmented, outdated systems, we’re creating a unified platform where thoughtful design turns complexity into clarity, confidence, and action.

As Product Design Lead for Tasks & Notifications, you’ll ensure our customers are working on the right thing at the right time. You’ll reimagine how users understand what matters, prioritize their work, and take action. You’ll also shape the platform tools that product teams will use to bring the right information and work to users at the right moment. You’ll also define the principles, templates, and tiering models that maintain quality across approximately 2,500+ templates and 1MM+ daily sends, giving users fewer, more relevant messages instead of more noise.

You’ll also lead design for Sandbox, a safe testing environment that gives IT administrators a copy of their production instance. You’ll help customers confidently build and validate settings, permissions, integrations, and workflows without affecting live data or employees.

Success in this role requires a designer who thrives in fast-paced environments, enjoys partnering closely with product, engineering, and cross-functional teams, and can quickly develop deep expertise in new domains. Designers at Rippling are product builders. AI isn't just something we design, it’s fundamental to how we work from exploration and prototyping to shipping world-class customer experiences.

About the team

Developer Platform builds the capabilities and experiences that help Rippling’s products work together as one coherent system. The team operates across product boundaries, solving foundational problems that affect how customers configure, understand, and interact with Rippling.

What you will do

• Define and drive the design vision for Inbox and Notifications, improving today’s experience while shaping how users discover, prioritize, and act on information across in-product, mobile, email, and other surfaces.
• Design systems that handle high volumes of tasks, alerts, approvals, and updates while accounting for prioritization, permissions, deadlines, and diverse user needs.
• Establish the principles, interaction patterns, quality standards, and governance that help teams create consistent notifications while moving quickly and addressing domain-specific needs.
• Lead end-to-end design for Sandbox, helping IT administrators safely configure, test, validate, and learn without introducing risk to their production environment.
• Develop a deep understanding of customer workflows through research, data, customer conversations, and close partnership with customer-facing teams.
• Partner tightly with Product and Engineering to frame ambiguous problems, make high-velocity decisions, and ship with urgency while maintaining a high quality bar.
• Use AI throughout the design process from research synthesis and requirements development to prototyping and exploring intelligent product experiences.

What you will need

• 8+ years of end-to-end product design experience shipping complex, high-impact products from concept to launch and iterating based on what you learn.
• A portfolio demonstrating strong product thinking and the ability to turn messy, ambiguous problem spaces into simple, intuitive workflows.
• Experience designing complex SaaS, enterprise, platform, productivity, or workflow products across multiple personas, permissions, states, and dependencies.
• Strong systems thinking, with the ability to connect functionality into coherent end-to-end journeys, anticipate second-order effects, and balance platform consistency with individual product needs.
• Excellent interaction and visual design craft, including the ability to produce polished work across edge cases and communicate clear, build-ready specifications.
• Relentless customer focus, backed by a habit of studying real behavior, identifying meaningful pain points, and using evidence to guide design decisions.
• Active use of LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, or similar) in your design workflow whether for research, requirements, copy, or exploration.
• Excellent communication and storytelling, from crisp async write-ups to persuasive presentations that drive alignment and decisions.