Lead Product Designer

About the Role

We are a fast-growing, seed-stage AI communication SaaS company based in Vienna, Austria, building an AI-powered phone assistant platform for small and medium-sized businesses across the DACH region and beyond. With around 50 people on the team and ambitious growth plans, we are looking for an experienced, hands-on Lead Product Designer to own design end-to-end — from product UX and design systems to brand and team leadership.

You will work directly with founders and engineering in short feedback loops, shape the experience for thousands of European business customers, and set the visual and product design standard across the company. This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role with daily shipping and direct customer access.

What You'll Do

Your time will be roughly split 50/50 between individual craft and team/design leadership:

• Take full ownership of product design, branding, and the design team.

• Drive hands-on product design, conduct customer interviews, and evolve the brand.

• Own three distinct product areas in close collaboration with Product and Engineering.

• Lead and scale the design team across website, branding, and product design.

• Collaborate closely with founders and engineering for fast decisions and tight feedback loops.

• Build deep customer understanding through regular conversations with target users (e.g. tradespeople, medical practices, professional services firms).

• Set and maintain design standards across product, web, and brand.

• Scale and maintain design systems for consistent implementation across multiple product areas.

• Ship with high impact — contribute meaningfully to daily releases with significant creative autonomy.

What We're Looking For

Dealbreakers:

• Native German speaker (Deutsch) with good English proficiency for an international team.

• Proven experience leading or managing design teams, or a strong demonstrated intent to step into design leadership while maintaining craft.

• 5+ years of end-to-end product design experience with ownership across multiple product areas.

Required skills & experience:

• Hands-on product design expertise with Figma, prototyping, and user research/interviews.

• Experience owning branding, website design, and product design — able to set and uphold standards across all three.

• Analytics-driven design mindset: you measure design decisions and iterate based on data, not intuition.

• Solid experience building and scaling design systems across multiple product areas.

• AI-first workflow: comfortable using modern AI tools (e.g. Cursor, v0, Claude) to accelerate design and prototyping.

Nice to have:

• Experience building and maintaining a design system at scale across a growing product portfolio.

• Domain familiarity with B2B software, professional services, or CRM-like environments.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: €80,000 – €150,000 gross per year, depending on experience.

• High degree of creative autonomy and direct impact on product direction.

• Work directly with founders in a fast-moving, shipping-focused environment.

• Opportunity to build and lead the design function from an early stage.

Please note: visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Location

This is an on-site role based in Vienna, Austria. Candidates should be based in or willing to relocate to Vienna.