Product Design Director, IT

About Rippling Rippling gives businesses one place to run HR, IT, and Finance. It brings together all of the workforce systems that are normally scattered across a company, like payroll, expenses, benefits, and computers. For the first time ever, you can manage and automate every part of the employee lifecycle in a single system. Take onboarding, for example. With Rippling, you can hire a new employee anywhere in the world and set up their payroll, corporate card, computer, benefits, and even third-party apps like Slack and Microsoft 365—all within 90 seconds. Based in San Francisco, CA, Rippling has raised $1.85B+ from the world’s top investors—including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and Bedrock—and was named one of America's best startup employers by Forbes. We prioritize candidate safety. Please be aware that all official communication will only be sent from @ Rippling.com addresses. About the role At Rippling, design is core to our mission: freeing smart people to work on hard problems. And for modern companies, IT is one of the hardest—and most consequential—problems to get right. Every employee needs the right device, the right apps, and the right access from day one. Every role change, location change, policy exception, and departure creates operational work and security risk. Most IT products were built for a world where admins manually configured systems, chased tickets, reviewed logs, and stitched together context across disconnected tools. Rippling is building a different kind of IT platform: one designed for how work should happen in an AI-first world. Today, IT admins spend too much time piecing together context: who someone is, what apps they use, which device they have, what policies apply, and what risks need attention. Rippling already has that context in one system. That creates a chance to redesign IT from the ground up as a product that can explain what’s happening, recommend what to do next, and automate the work that shouldn’t require human effort. As Product Design Director for IT, you’ll set the vision and quality bar for this next-generation platform. You’ll lead teams designing experiences powerful enough for IT and security leaders to manage complex, global environments, yet intuitive enough for every employee to get help, access, and equipment without friction. You’ll push the organization to think from first principles, prototype deeply, and use AI as part of both how we build and what we ship. What you will do Set the vision and quality bar for Rippling’s IT management platform, making it powerful enough for IT leaders and intuitive enough for every employee Unify fragmented workflows—identity, access, device management, inventory, security, and compliance—into one coherent product with consistent patterns, policies, and reporting Rethink IT workflows for an AI-first world, designing where the system should explain, recommend, automate, or ask for human judgment Make the fundamentals effortless, so everyday tasks like provisioning access, shipping devices, enforcing MFA, managing role changes, and offboarding employees feel automatic rather than administrative Raise the craft bar, shaping experiences that communicate security, control, and observability through every interaction and detail Mentor and grow a world-class design team, running strong critiques, sharpening judgment, and helping designers do the best work of their careers Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, and customers to turn complex needs into clear priorities, fast decisions, and measurable business impact What you will need 8+ years of product design experience, including 5+ years managing and leading design teams A track record of bringing relentless customer focus to high-impact projects and driving strategic business outcomes through design Strong systems thinking, with experience leading the design of integrated suites or ecosystems A strong personal practice using AI tooling to accelerat