# UX Product Design Lead

**Company:** [Skydio](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/skydio)
**Location:** San Mateo, CA
**Role:** Product Design
**Salary:** $180k – $220k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** User Experience Design, Product Design, Prototyping, Visual Design, Complex Systems Architecture, Storytelling, Cross-Platform Design, Mobile Design Patterns, Html/Css/Javascript, AI Tools
**Posted:** 2026-06-11

> Lead UX strategy and design for autonomous drone platforms, creating intuitive interfaces that build operator trust in complex AI/hardware systems. Requires senior-level design leadership, high-fidelity prototyping, and experience with technical domains like robotics or geospatial systems.

## Job Description

## How You'll Make an Impact

**Design for Trust:** Lead the UX strategy and execution for our core platforms (including remote operations). You will build interfaces for autonomous flying robots that make the operator trust the job will get done, ensuring every interaction reinforces confidence, reliability, and system transparency.

**Solve Unsolved Problems:** Tackle complex challenges where there is no existing playbook. You will think pragmatically and creatively to design interfaces for remote hardware sensing, 3D spatial awareness, and AI-driven missions.

**Drive the Narrative:** Use exceptional storytelling to communicate user needs, frame complex problems, and align Engineering, Product Management, and Executive leadership around a unified, grounded design vision.

**Elevate the Craft:** Bring an uncompromising attention to detail and craftsmanship to the team. You will build high-fidelity prototypes to test assumptions quickly, leveraging AI tools as a seamless part of your daily process to move faster and explore wider.

**Get in the Field:** Go on-site with our customers to deeply understand their chaotic, high-stress environments. Bring that "ground truth" back to the studio so it informs every pixel.

## What Makes You a Great Fit (Your Superpowers)

- **First-Principles Problem Solver:** You are an out-of-the-box thinker who loves operating in ambiguous spaces where no existing design patterns exist.
- **Uncompromising Craftsmanship:** A portfolio that clearly demonstrates an exceptionally high bar for visual design, complex systems architecture, and attention to detail.
- **Strategic Leadership:** You have a proven track record of driving design strategy at a senior/lead level, actively shaping product roadmaps rather than just taking orders.
- **Fluency in Complexity:** Demonstrated experience shipping products in highly technical disciplines. We want to see portfolios featuring: Robotics Controls, Avionics, Geospatial/Mapping, Heavy Data/Fleet Management, or Remote Hardware Sensing.
- **Prototyping Chops ("You Build to Think"):** You can quickly mock up interactive prototypes to prove out concepts before Engineering writes a line of production code. You also actively integrate AI tools into your daily workflow to increase velocity and explore wider.

## Nice to Haves

- Deep understanding of Android-based HIG and Mobile Design Patterns for physical hardware controllers.
- Front-end coding ability (HTML/CSS/Javascript) to help bridge the gap with engineering.

## Compensation & Benefits

- Annual base salary range: $180,000 - $220,000
- Equity in the form of stock options
- Comprehensive benefits packages including group health insurance plans
- Paid vacation time, sick leave, holiday pay
- 401K savings plan
- Relocation assistance may be provided for eligible roles

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