What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Product Designer position at nTopology?
Engineering teams in aerospace and defense, industrial energy, turbomachinery, and high-performance automotive use nTop to explore design spaces and optimize performance at a scale traditional CAD can't support, compressing months of iteration into hours. We're a growth-stage company with deep roots in computational geometry, and we're at an inflection point in how our product works and what it needs to become.
We're looking for a Staff Product Designer to rebuild and lead our design function, and to define how expert engineers understand, build, and reason about complex computational workflows.
nTop's users are aerospace engineers optimizing structural and thermal performance across conceptual design phases, analysts running physics-based simulations to evaluate hundreds of variants at once, and computational designers whose workflow looks more like software development than traditional drafting.
Our interface has to match their precision, reducing friction without hiding power, making complexity legible without making it shallow. That means learning the visual vocabulary of a domain (signed-distance fields, vector fields, surface continuity, CFD overlays) and designing systems that make it coherent and navigable for experts.
And then there's the larger shift underway. nTop has historically been a workstation application: one engineer, one screen, one design session. That model is changing. Our customers increasingly need to synthesize millions of design variants, run physics-based simulations across all of them, and optimize against mission requirements. These are workloads that require high-performance computing, not a single laptop. Our product already has this capability, but it requires custom code and infrastructure work to deploy. We're investing heavily in making these workflows a native part of the nTop experience, which means designing entirely new surfaces: web-based interfaces, agentic development environments, workflow orchestration views. This is the most significant product design opportunity we have, and it's largely uncharted.
- Own the product's design architecture. Define the interaction primitives, conceptual models, and design principles that govern how users understand and work within nTop, across the existing workstation product and the new surfaces being built.
- Set cross-product design direction. Identify systemic inconsistencies and opportunities before they become entrenched, and drive alignment across product management and software engineering.
- Work the problem with the people closest to it. Partner with our forward-deployed field engineering team, who work directly with customers on real programs, and our UX researcher to identify the friction points that most affect users and our business.
- Define how AI capabilities reach users. At nTop, AI means physics-surrogate models, generative geometry workflows, and engineering knowledge systems. Define the interaction patterns that make these capabilities useful and interpretable in practice.
- Establish the design foundation. As the sole designer on the product team, create the design system, principles, and documentation that the software engineering organization can build against, and that future designers can build on.
- Partner with product and technology leadership. Work directly with the VP of Product and CTO on roadmap decisions and architectural trade-offs.
- 8 years of product design experience on complex, expert-grade software, including engineering tools, developer platforms, data or simulation systems, or equivalent.
- Demonstrated staff-level scope: you have owned design systems or platform architecture, not just features, and can point to organizational impact from decisions that outlasted your direct involvement.
- Systems thinker: skilled at designing abstractions, states, and constraints that remain coherent and extensible as the product grows.
- Strong information architecture instincts for expert users in constraint-heavy, precision workflows.
- Able to build alignment without formal authority, across software engineering, product management, and executive leadership, through clarity, craft, and well-reasoned argument.
- Comfortable in technical depth. You don't need to write code, but you need to participate as a peer in conversations about architecture, performance, and trade-offs. Familiarity with computational design, parametric modeling, visual programming, or physics-based simulation is a strong plus.
- Experience designing for AI-assisted workflows, including interaction patterns for uncertainty, model transparency, and human override.
This is a role with real weight: you'll rebuild and lead our design function, with direct influence over the full product experience and a seat at the table for strategic decisions. Our users are engineers solving hard problems in demanding industries. The work is technically serious and the stakes are real.
This role is based in New York and reports to the VP of Product.
Compensation: $180,000-200,000 annually plus options and benefits
nTopology is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. nTopology is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.
Salary : $180,000 - $200,000