Staff Product Designer - Agent Experience

Render is building a modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native applications. They are seeking a Staff Product Designer to own the Agent Experience program, designing a cohesive interface for both developers and agents while ensuring trust and usability across various surfaces.

Responsibilities:

• Design the full programmatic interface, not just the CLI. The agent operates Render through many doors — the CLI, the API, MCP, SDKs, Blueprints, and Skills — and they should feel like one coherent product, not a set of independently evolved tools. You'll own the interaction model and the error language across all of them, so an agent can run deploy → verify → debug → iterate without a human in the loop. A one-command path from empty directory to running app matters, but so does an API call an agent can reason about and an MCP surface it can operate reliably. An error message an agent can't parse and recover from is a broken feature, and you'll treat it that way — on every surface
• Design documentation as an agent-facing product. Docs aren't just for humans anymore; they're how an agent learns to operate the platform. You'll design Blueprints, Skills, and reference material that teach an agent to use Render correctly — treating docs-as-experience as a first-class programmatic surface, with the same rigor as any command or endpoint
• Close the human-operated gap in onboarding. Today the default first-deploy path runs service-by-service through the UI — the one thing an agent fundamentally can't operate. You'll design a configuration-first path where the whole system is described in code (Blueprints) and deployed in one motion, so the programmatic loop doesn't break at step one
• Design the dashboard surfaces where agent work becomes visible to humans. When an agent deploys, retries, or fails on someone's behalf, a person needs to see what happened, why, and whether to trust it. You'll design the review, supervision, and activity surfaces for agent-driven work — web UI held to the same rigor as any flagship flow, because this is where confidence in the whole agent story is won or lost
• Design agent auth and access. Consent, scoping, and token management — so a developer can grant an agent or third-party app exactly the access it needs, see what that access is being used for, and revoke it without fear. Least-privilege should feel legible and safe rather than all-or-nothing. This is half policy design, half interface design, and it's where "can I trust this?" gets answered
• Design one model, expressed everywhere. The core objects of the platform — applications, services, environments — should mean the same thing whether you meet them in the dashboard, the CLI, the API, an SDK, MCP, or a Blueprint. You'll design that model once and hold every surface to it, so a human and an agent are always looking at the same product
• Surface the agent-operable paths at moments of intent. Copy-a-prompt CTAs, post-signup CLI install, post-error tooling suggestions. The programmatic paths already exist but aren't discovered — you'll place them where developer intent is highest

Requirements:

• 7+ years of product design experience, ideally on developer tools, infrastructure, APIs, or another technical, credibility-driven product
• Craft that spans GUI and non-GUI surfaces
• You design the whole journey, not a surface at a time
• A genuine point of view on what AI-native products mean for design — including how a product should show up to an agent, and not only to a person
• Comfort near code
• The judgment to define quality where no established playbook exists, and the rigor to hold that bar once you've set it
• Clear, direct communication and cross-org influence
• Experience designing or shipping a CLI, SDK, API, or MCP surface used at scale
• Experience designing agent-facing documentation, Blueprints, Skills, or other material intended to teach a model how to operate a system
• Familiarity with OAuth, scoped tokens, or least-privilege access models — or an appetite to make permissions feel humane
• Hands-on experience building with coding agents or LLM-driven tooling, with a view on where the agent loop breaks down today
• Design-engineering literacy: motion, prototyping, or front-end fluency
• Experience evolving a developer-first product toward larger teams and enterprises without losing the original audience
• Writing, talks, or side projects that show your craft and point of view on developer experience