Director, AI Design & Experience

Overview Chicago; Dallas; New York; San Francisco

Company Overview We are the better way to work in finance. As private equity's value creation partner, we sit at the heart of PE—where sponsors and CFOs meet. Through financial consulting rooted in data, technology, and AI, we help clients drive value—supporting the office of the CFO to drive end-to-end value creation.

If you crave challenging work and are looking to grow, come solve complex issues alongside 1,400+ finance & technology experts in a supportive, collaborative environment.

Backed by premier private equity firms and headquartered in New York with 10 offices around the globe, we are a high-growth, entrepreneurial firm looking for people who want to be part of building something great. Come make your mark.

Data & Analytics Accordion's Data & Analytics (D&A) team offers cutting-edge, intelligent solutions to a global clientele, leveraging a blend of domain knowledge, sophisticated technology tools, and deep analytics capabilities to tackle complex business challenges.

We partner with Private Equity clients and their Portfolio Companies across diverse sectors, including Retail, CPG, Healthcare, Media & Entertainment, Technology, and Logistics.

We deliver data and analytical solutions designed to streamline reporting capabilities and enhance business insights across vast and complex data sets ranging from Sales, Operations, Marketing, Pricing, Customer Strategies, and more.

This role can be based in any of our US office locations and is a hybrid role with the flexibility to work remotely 2 days a week. Ideal candidates should be local to the desired location.

This position is not eligible for immigration sponsorship.

About the Role and You We're looking for a designer who understands that AI changes everything about how humans interact with software, and especially is obsessed with getting those interactions right. You won't be adding chatbots to existing interfaces. You'll be reimagining what's possible when intelligence is embedded into every touchpoint.

This role sits at the intersection of design, AI, advanced data analytics, and product strategy. You'll work hand-in-hand with our Accordion Intelligence Lab (a team of expert software engineers building the AI capabilities that power our solutions) translating complex model outputs into experiences that feel intuitive, trustworthy, and genuinely useful to finance professionals who don't have time for friction.

What You'll Do You'll define the design language for AI-native experiences across Accordion's solution portfolio. This means moving beyond traditional UI patterns to create new interaction paradigms : how users prompt and guide AI systems, how they interpret and validate AI-generated insights, how they maintain appropriate oversight without drowning in alerts, and how they build trust in outputs they can't fully verify themselves.

Your day-to-day will involve deep collaboration with engineers building LLM-powered features, RAG systems, and agentic workflows. You'll prototype rapidly, test with real users, and iterate based on what you learn about how finance professionals actually want to work with AI. You'll establish design principles and patterns that scale across products while remaining flexible enough to evolve as AI capabilities advance.

You'll own the end-to-end experience strategy for AI interactions : from first-time onboarding that builds user confidence, to progressive disclosure of AI capabilities, to graceful handling of uncertainty and errors. You'll think deeply about when AI should act autonomously versus when it should ask for guidance, and design the interfaces that make those handoffs seamless.

Travel to client sites as needed.

What We're Looking For The AI-Native Mindset : You've been designing for AI long enough to have strong opinions about what works and what doesn't. You understand the unique challenges of AI interfaces : uncertainty, latency, explainability, trust calibration — and have developed approaches to address them. You're thinking about copilots, agents, and multimodal interactions, not just chat windows.

The Technical Fluency : You can have substantive conversations with ML engineers about model capabilities and limitations. You understand enough about LLMs, embeddings, retrieval systems, and agent architectures to design experiences that work with these technologies rather than against them. You've seen how prompt design affects UX and vice versa.

The Craft Excellence : Your visual and interaction design skills are exceptional. You can take complex, data-dense financial workflows and make them elegant. You prototype at high fidelity and can articulate the reasoning behind every design decision. You've built and maintained design systems that scale.

The Research Rigor : You ground your designs in real user behavior. You know how to run effective user research with busy professionals, extract actionable insights, and translate findings into design improvements. You measure the success of your work and iterate accordingly.

The Strategic Influence : You can advocate for design at the leadership level and shape product direction. You build strong partnerships with product, engineering, and business stakeholders. You know how to make the case for design investments and demonstrate their impact.

Requirements 8+ years of product design experience, with 3+ years focused on AI-powered or data-intensive applications

Demonstrated portfolio of AI / ML interface design showing sophisticated approaches to human-AI interaction

Deep experience with design systems, prototyping tools (Figma, Framer, or equivalent), and front-end collaboration

Track record of shipping AI features that users actually adopt and value

Strong user research skills and evidence-based design practice

Excellent communication skills with both technical and executive audiences

Ideal Background You might come from a product design leadership role at a company pushing the boundaries of AI interaction, a design agency doing cutting-edge AI work, or a startup where you owned the entire design experience for AI-native products. What matters most is that you've wrestled with the hard problems of human-AI interaction and have the portfolio to prove it.

Bonus points if you've designed for enterprise finance, CFO tools, or other high-stakes professional contexts where accuracy and trust are paramount.

What Success Looks Like In your first year, you'll have established Accordion's AI design language and shipped it across multiple products. You'll have built a research practice that continuously informs how we design AI experiences. You'll be the person our AI Lab turns to when they need to figure out how a new capability should actually work for users—and the person our clients reference when they talk about why Accordion's AI feels different from everyone else.

The annual salary for this role ranges from : $170,000 to $225,000 USD + benefits + bonus. Actual compensation packages are determined by evaluating a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to geographic location, skill set, years and depth of experience, education, certifications, cost of labor and internal equity.

EEO Information Accordion is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

Please note that as per Accordion policy, we do not accept unsolicited resumes from third-party recruiters unless such recruiters are engaged to provide candidates for a specified opening and in alignment with our inclusive diversity values. Any employment agency, person or entity that submits an unsolicited resume does so with the understanding that Accordion will have the right to hire that applicant at its discretion without any fee owed to the submitting employment agency, person or entity.

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