senior manager, ai experience designer 4961700

At Pfizer, our mission is to create breakthroughs that change patients’ lives, and the company just rebuilt its entire technology operating model to deliver on it. Pfizer is becoming an AI-native, agentic-supported organization: enterprise AI platforms in the hands of all 80,000 colleagues, decisions moved closest to the work, and a deeper level of federation than most industry peers. For a designer, this is a rare moment: a 177-year-old company rewiring itself around AI, feedback loops measured in days, and design decisions that shape how an entire company works and how medicines reach patients. We are looking for a Senior Manager, AI Experience Designer to shape how those platforms look, sound, and behave.

The Senior Manager, AI Experience Designer drives products from inside the team: sitting with engineers and product owners daily, shaping scope and priorities with them, and pushing concepts to working proofs in days rather than weeks. What makes this role different is what it owns: pattern areas of Pfizer’s AI-first design system, shipped as code into the build pipeline so the correct, compliant pattern is what every team gets by default. Success is measured the way the platforms are measured: pattern reuse, first-pass compliance, and experiences colleagues actually adopt.

Design is changing fast, and this role stays ahead of it: exploring new tools and methods first, testing them on real work, and bringing what works back into the system. The role keeps the reference library behind Pfizer’s automated design quality checks, watches how patterns perform in the wild, and retires the ones that stop earning their place. A strong technical background is required: the role builds with LLM APIs and agent frameworks to prototype real agent behavior, speaks the language of engineers, and holds their own in product and architecture conversations.

This is an individual contributor role with real authority over the work: the Senior Manager, AI Experience Designer delivers the work personally and owns the outcome. This role specifically requires experience designing Agentic AI and Conversational UX (LLM-enabled assistants): how AI systems behave, communicate, and act, balancing autonomy, human-in-the-loop controls, transparency, safety, and trust.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

Design System Pattern Ownership: Own specific pattern areas of Pfizer’s AI-first design system (assistant UI components, conversation templates, transparency and disclosure components, escalation patterns, trust and verification cues) as products with adoption targets.

Design Standards as Code: Ship design tokens, components, and patterns into the engineering build pipeline and MCP so the correct, compliant pattern is the default for every team.

Design QA Reference Library: Maintain the reference library behind automated design quality checks: the voice patterns, disclosure components, and trust cues the Design QA Agent enforces.

Pattern Adoption & Standards Drift: Monitor pattern usage, override rate, and exception requests for owned surfaces; retire or redesign patterns the data shows are not working.

Agent Prototyping in Code: Build with LLM APIs and agent frameworks to prototype real agent behavior rather than static screens, and validate workflows and risks before build.

Agentic & Conversational Design: Lead the design of Agentic AI experiences where systems can plan, make decisions, call tools/functions, and complete multi-step workflows with humans in the loop. Own Conversational UX end-to-end (chat and/or voice): dialog flows, conversation state, error recovery, escalation to human support, and safe fallback behaviors.

Assistant Behavior Design: Design and document assistant behaviors: tone and voice, grounded responses, refusal patterns, transparency cues, and trust-building interaction patterns.

Hands-On Design Partnership: Be a vocal, engaged, proactive, and hands-on partner within a cross-functional team, shaping scope and priorities with engineers and product owners daily.

Rapid Delivery: Deliver end-to-end design for high-impact projects under tight deadlines, ensuring alignment with business goals, user needs, and technical feasibility; produce MVPs and proofs of concept that validate business ideas within days.

Accessibility & Inclusive Design: Ensure accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA) across all designs, championing inclusive design practices for diverse user needs.

Playbooks & Pattern Libraries: Create reusable playbooks and pattern libraries for agentic workflows and conversational design (e.g., escalation, repair, safety responses, approvals, and multi-step task orchestration).

Enablement & Peer Mentorship: Proactively train and mentor designers and cross-functional partners on the rapid prototyping process, AI tools, and internal design systems.

Product-Minded Design Strategy: Act as a product-minded design strategist: frame problems, define hypotheses, influence roadmaps with Product partners, and connect design decisions to measurable outcomes.

ROLE BEHAVIOURS

Don't Lose Your Curiosity: Experiments constantly with new AI design tools and methods on real work; shares what works and keeps their own practice current as the craft changes.

Act with Agency: Gets just enough context and starts making; improvises around missing inputs, acts on partial information, and corrects course through the work itself rather than waiting for a plan. Pairs that bias to build with care for the craft: a strong sense of style, sweated interaction detail, and taste grounded in systems design.

Set an Example for Your Team: Models craft and pace for peers; the quality and speed of their own shipped work sets the standard others reference.

Own the Outcome: Takes accountability for the adoption and quality of the surfaces and patterns they own; follows their work past release to confirm it performs.

Be Polymath Oriented: Combines interaction and conversation design with working technical knowledge of LLMs and agents; moves comfortably between design, product, and engineering contexts.

Communicate with Precision: Writes specs and documentation engineers can build from directly; presents design rationale clearly to product and engineering partners.

Think in Systems: Designs patterns for reuse, considering how each component behaves across products and agent surfaces rather than on a single screen.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree with at least 6+ years of experience; OR a Master’s degree with more than 5+ years of experience

• 6-10 years of progressive UX design experience, with a proven track record in delivering high-impact digital products and experiences.

• Working fluency with front-end development principles, design tokens, and APIs, sufficient to ship design system components into engineering pipelines.

• Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs or agent frameworks to prototype real agent behavior in code, not only static interfaces.

• Experience shipping design system components and patterns into production engineering pipelines (design tokens, documented components, versioned patterns).

• Demonstrate experience designing Conversational UX (chat and/or voice), including dialog flows, conversation state, repair/fallback patterns, escalation, and tone/voice guidelines.

• Demonstrate experience designing Agentic AI workflows (systems that can take actions via tools/functions), including human-in-the-loop controls, approvals, transparency, and safe failure modes.

• Extensive experience working with AI-driven design tools and platforms, with a deep understanding of how to leverage them for rapid prototyping and iterative design.

• "AI-first" mindset with a proven willingness to challenge traditional design paradigms and adopt augmented workflows to radically accelerate delivery cycles.

• Expertise in accessibility and inclusive design, with hands-on experience ensuring WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across a wide variety of digital platforms.

• Proven ability to deliver complex design projects under tight deadlines with a focus on speed, efficiency, and quality.

• Strong communication skills, including the ability to present and justify design decisions to product, engineering, and business partners, and to senior leadership in partnership with design leadership on executive presentations.

• A robust portfolio demonstrating system-level design thinking, AI-powered experiences, and rapid prototyping techniques, including design system components or patterns shipped as production code.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

Strong product design experience (not only UI): partnering with Product/Engineering to shape scope, prioritize tradeoffs, and define measurable outcomes.

Expertise in working within lean or agile environments with fast-paced, iterative product cycles.

Previous experience designing within the healthcare or pharmaceutical sectors is a plus.

Experience defining responsible AI UX patterns: transparency/disclosures, explainability cues, privacy boundaries, and trust/safety guardrails.

Experience with AI experience evaluation approaches: conversation quality testing, scenario-based risk testing, and iterative improvement loops tied to product metrics.

Strong knowledge of service design, journey mapping, or customer experience frameworks.

ADVANCED-LEVEL SKILLS

Craft Depth: Produces high-quality interaction and conversation design end-to-end, from ambiguous input to shippable patterns, under tight timelines.

Design-Engineering Collaboration: Ships design tokens and components into engineering pipelines; understands front-end and API constraints well enough to design within them.

Applied AI Fluency: Working knowledge of how LLMs and agentic systems behave, applied directly in prototypes and pattern design.

Clear Communication: Presents and defends design decisions with product and engineering partners; produces documentation strong enough to scale beyond their own surfaces.

Problem Framing: Turns loosely defined requests into concrete design problems and validated prototypes.

Candidate demonstrates a breadth of diverse leadership experiences and capabilities including: the ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.

PHYSICAL/MENTAL REQUIREMENTS

• Strong digital literacy and an "AI-first" mental model, with the ability to critically evaluate and integrate generative tools into the creative process to solve complex design challenges at scale.

• Ability to manage multiple complex programs and projects simultaneously.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

NON-STANDARD WORK SCHEDULE, TRAVEL OR ENVIRONMENT REQUIREMENTS

• Occasional travel may be required for workshops, team meetings, or stakeholder engagement.

• Flexibility to work across global time zones as needed.