Job Description

Hiring is one of the most consequential decisions a person makes or receives, and the tools that power it are becoming genuinely agentic. We are seeking a Principal Designer who can lead the design vision across our hiring portfolio at exactly this inflection point.

This is a rare role. The products you'll shape increasingly act on behalf of the people who use them: drafting job descriptions, surfacing candidates, generating assessments, flagging risks, and moving work forward. The underlying systems are probabilistic. The experience you design must not be. Your core challenge is translating AI systems that operate on confidence, inference, and ranked signals into interactions that feel trustworthy, purposeful, and in control, where users understand what the system did, why, and what happens next.

You are a senior individual contributor with dual accountability: you define experience strategy across the full hiring portfolio and you stay hands-on at a level of craft others aspire to. You partner as a peer with Principal Engineers, PMs, and Research leaders from concept through launch. You influence product direction and business strategy, and you set the quality bar, not by reviewing work, but by making work others cannot make. You believe delight is achievable in enterprise software and you prove it.

Key job responsibilities
- Define the agentic interaction model for hiring. Own the design of experiences where AI acts on behalf of recruiters and hiring managers: delegation surfaces, approval flows, correction mechanisms, confidence transparency, and escalation paths. Establish when the system should act, when it should ask, and what trust looks like when it gets something wrong.
- Bridge probabilistic outputs to deterministic user experiences. AI hiring signals are inherently uncertain: fit scores, ranked candidates, inferred context, generated summaries. Design how those signals surface in ways that are honest about uncertainty, preserve human judgment, build trust over time, and behave predictably even when the model does not.
- Own experience vision and strategy across the hiring portfolio. Set the north star for Recruiter Hub, Hiring Hub, and Candidate Hub as a coherent, connected system, not three products. Define how users move between surfaces, how context transfers, and how the portfolio adds up to more than its parts.
- Set the design excellence bar through your own work. Produce interaction models, user flows, high-fidelity designs, and interactive prototypes at a level of rigor and finish that shifts what the team believes is possible. Visual craft, micro-interaction quality, and moments of delight in hiring workflows are not cosmetic, they are trust mechanisms. Hold that standard without compromise.
- Establish cross-product design standards. Define the interaction models, experience principles, and design patterns that govern AI-assisted hiring surfaces across the portfolio. Ensure the system speaks one language, particularly at the human-AI boundary: how recommendations are framed, how uncertainty is expressed, how user intent is captured and confirmed.
- Influence product and business direction. Work with senior leadership to identify where design unlocks product strategy, not just executes it. Bring recruiter, hiring manager, and candidate insight into roadmap decisions before requirements are written. Be a named voice in strategic tradeoffs.
- Analyze complex problems with rigor. Use research, behavioral data, usability findings, and design strategy to diagnose the real problem before proposing a solution. Surface the gap between what users say, what they do, and what the system currently allows.
- Lead design craft and raise organizational capability. Act as creative director for quality across the portfolio. Partner with design managers to raise the floor on visual craft, interaction quality, and storytelling. Mentor through doing: show the work, name the reasoning, make the standard visible.
- Communicate with executive presence. Present work to design, product, and executive leadership in a way that makes the design rationale legible to non-designers and makes the business case for quality. You are a confident, compelling advocate for the customer and for craft.
- Ensure engineering partnership through delivery. Provide specifications that function as machine-readable behavior contracts, not annotated Figma. Review implementations with the same standard you applied to the design. Close the gap between intent and reality.

A day in the life
You spend the first part of your morning in a design review, but you're not just critiquing. You've pulled the interaction spec for the AI-generated candidate summary feature and you've marked three places where the model's uncertainty isn't surfaced and the recruiter has no visibility into why a candidate was ranked down. You come with a reframe, not a list. By mid-morning you're in a product strategy session with the PM and Principal Engineer on the Candidate Hub. The roadmap has a capability on it that, under the current architecture, will fragment the experience into a fourth separate surface. You draw the alternative live in the room and it changes the conversation.

In the afternoon you're head-down prototyping. You're building the trust and control model for the hiring agent's approval flow, specifically the moment where the system has taken an action you might want to reverse. You're making it feel like a capable colleague who flagged you, not a system demanding sign-off. You test three versions before you find the one that earns trust without adding friction. You'll share it with the research team tomorrow.

You end the day reviewing a designer's work on the notification model. You give direct feedback, you show what you'd change, and you name why. You are investing in the team's eye as much as you are in the product.

About the team
Talent Solutions Product Design & Research designs the products that power how Amazon hires: the tools recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers, and candidates use across the full hiring journey. We own the end-to-end experience across the Recruiter Hub, Hiring Hub, and Candidate Hub, and we are at the leading edge of what it means to put AI into consequential, human-centered workflows.

We are building agentic products in a domain where trust is not optional. Our AI systems recommend, rank, predict, and increasingly act. Our design work determines whether people trust those systems enough to rely on them, understand them enough to correct them, and feel good enough about the experience to advocate for it. We are designers, researchers, and strategists who work backward from the people we serve, hold an unusually high bar for craft, and believe that the experience of being hired or of hiring someone matters.

Basic Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree
- 8+ years of UX design experience with a portfolio demonstrating mastery across strategy, interaction design, and visual craft
- Experience designing AI-assisted or data-driven products, including surfaces that surface uncertainty, confidence, or ranked outputs to users
- Demonstrated ability to define design strategy and influence product roadmap at the senior level
- Experience owning or significantly contributing to a design system at scale
- Proficiency with Figma and prototyping tools at a level that communicates detailed interaction behavior

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience designing agentic or AI-native products: autonomous actions, agent handoffs, delegation models, trust and transparency UX
- Prior work on hiring, talent, or enterprise workflow products
- Familiarity with responsible AI design principles: bias surfaces, explainability, guardrails, human-in-the-loop patterns
- Track record of elevating design quality across a team or organization, not just within your own scope

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits

USA, WA, Seattle - 164,000.00 - 221,800.00 USD annually