Design Thinking Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Design at Anthropic sits at the intersection of craft, research, and product intuition. We're a small team working on products that millions of people use daily-and on interactions that don't have established conventions yet.

Our work shapes how people experience AI: whether Claude feels like a tool or a collaborator, whether it earns trust or erodes it. We partner closely with engineers and researchers, often designing around capabilities that are emerging in real-time. That means staying close to the models, prototyping rapidly, and being comfortable with ambiguity.

We care deeply about craft-the details that make something feel polished and trustworthy-but we ship fast and learn in the open. We'd rather get something in front of users and iterate than wait for perfection.

This role is a mix of team leadership and hands-on design execution. As a designer, we're looking for someone who ships fast and stays in motion-you'd rather get something in front of users this week than perfect it for a month. You're excited to question fundamental UI assumptions and invent patterns that feel native to AI, you're already using tools like Claude Code to extend what you can build, and you pay attention to where model capabilities are heading, not just what Claude can do today-all while keeping care for the pixels, the copy, and the edge cases.

As a leader, you develop talent: you've mentored designers and helped them grow their skills, confidence, and impact, and you give clear, actionable feedback. You build alignment without authority, influencing cross-functional partners through strong communication and collaborative problem-solving rather than hierarchy. You know when to roll up your sleeves and when to empower your team-modeling the quality bar while creating opportunities for others to lead. You think systematically, establishing reusable frameworks that help the team work more effectively, and you advocate strategically, representing design in leadership discussions and helping shape product direction rather than just executing on it.

Read more here for the type of features we build.

Team leadership

• Manage and mentor 2-6+ product designers, providing regular coaching, feedback, and career development support
• Establish and maintain design quality standards across your team's work
• Coordinate cross-team design efforts, ensuring consistency and alignment across related product areas
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to define team roadmaps and prioritize design resources
• Advocate for design within the broader organization and help shape product strategy
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and building design team culture
• Help define and evolve design processes, tools, and ways of working

Design execution

• Contribute to the strategic direction of our tools, rooted in deep user empathy
• Define feature areas with exceptional attention to detail and polish, identifying opportunities to improve quality and consistency of broader flows
• Craft beautiful, polished, and delightful user interfaces that build trust and showcase the power of our AI technology
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, AI researchers and other stakeholders to define product vision, strategy and roadmaps
• Rapidly prototype ideas using code and other methods to communicate concepts and build excitement
• Find creative ways to ship high-quality work in a fast-paced, often ambiguous, resource-constrained startup environment

• Experience managing or leading product designers, including coaching, feedback, and career development
• Experience designing and shipping digital products end-to-end
• A portfolio demonstrating user-centered design thinking and polished UI craftsmanship
• Proficiency with modern design and prototyping tools, such as Figma

• 8+ years of product design experience, with 2+ years in a lead or management role
• Proven track record of executing end-to-end on large and complex products, or a series of products, in ambiguous environments
• Experience prototyping with front-end code (e.g., HTML/CSS/JS)
• Experience using AI tools such as Claude Code as a creative partner in your own design practice
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills to work effectively with cross-functional teams and influence without authority
• Passion for crafting scaled, highly impactful, safe and beneficial artificial intelligence technologies to enable new possibilities