Lead Product Designer

Job Title: Lead Product Designer Employment Status: Exempt Office Hours: Hybrid Location: Vienna, Austria OR Boston, MA, USA Compensation: Vienna based: €110K+ salary based on experience, Boston based: $155K-$168K salary. Compensation also includes performance-based bonus program and equity *compensation dependent on related experience level About Ketryx: Ketryx is the AI-native compliance platform for regulated industries. We help medical device, pharma, and automotive teams ship software faster without compromising on the safety and quality standards their industries — and their patients — depend on. We're a Series B company with offices in Boston and Vienna, and we're building the system of record for how regulated AI gets developed and shipped. About the Role: We're hiring a Lead Product Designer to make our design team a primary source of user truth at Ketryx. Our users are not casual software consumers. They are systems engineers, quality leads, regulatory specialists, and software developers working on products where mistakes have real consequences. Designing for them means understanding their work at a depth most B2B companies never reach — and translating that understanding into workflows that feel obvious to the people who live in them every day. You'll build and lead a research-led design function that deeply understands these personas, shapes what we build (not just how it looks), and partners with product on every roadmap decision. You'll inherit a small team in Vienna, a strong product partnership, and a company that takes design seriously as a peer function across R&D. This is a hands-on leadership role at early-stage pace. You should be excited to run the playbook yourself before scaling it. Responsibilities: Own discovery as a craft. Stand up a JTBD and persona knowledge base that PMs, engineers, and customer success reference weekly as shared vocabulary. Run a sustained cadence of user research — interviews, synthesis, prototype-based hypothesis testing — at a depth that would have required a much larger research org a few years ago. Shape the roadmap upstream. Embed designers as partners with product managers from the earliest stages of discovery, not as downstream service providers. Be the person who can change a roadmap decision through research rather than assertion. Install the rituals — design reviews, discovery syncs, artifact ownership — that keep the user voice central when commercial pressure pulls direction elsewhere. Design end-to-end workflows for specialized users. Lead design for products used by multiple personas across a single regulated workflow — from upstream tools like Jira, Polarion, and GitHub all the way through to compliance artifacts and audit-ready records. "User-friendly" here doesn't mean consumer polish; it means making genuinely complex work feel coherent. Build the team and the operating model. Develop the design team thoughtfully. Raise the craft bar on persona-to-workflow translation. Establish the standards, systems, and tooling that let design scale without depending on a single leader being in every room. Operationalize AI in the design process. Use AI-native tooling to compress the discovery-to-insight loop and run more research, more rigorously, than a traditional team of your size could. We're more interested in how you go deeper on discovery than how fast you can prototype. Required Skills: A track record shipping design for specialized B2B users in regulated or technically deep domains — medtech, legal tech, compliance, industrial, developer tools, finance. A research-led orientation. You can show — not describe — a JTBD or persona knowledge base you've built, and walk us through a product decision it shaped. Hands-on experience leading a design team through the AI-native transition, with a perspective that goes beyond "we prototype faster now." Currently a design lead or strong #2 at a Series B/C B2B SaaS company. Early-stage operating experience is essential. Willin