Principal UX Designer (m/f/x) – AI Design

About usThe appliedAI Initiative elevates Europe’s industry to become shapers in the age of AI, creating a future that we desire to live in. Through our ecosystem of strong partners, comprehensive programs, services and solutions we advance companies holistically on their AI journey. With our uniquely diverse, interdisciplinary, and driven team, we build on deep technical expertise while specializing on applicability of the solutions. We share a mindset of collaboration and openness with our ecosystem of leading companies and tech players. Our common goal is to strengthen the European landscape, jointly creating unique knowledge for applying trustworthy AI. We believe that AI Agents will be the dominant topic for AI in the near future and that appliedAI with its partner ecosystem will impact how this technology is being used in industry and beyond in Europe. Your missionMost AI projects don't fail on the model - they fail because nobody wants to use what was built. As our Principal UX Designer, you'll be the specialist authority who makes sure that never happens for our clients: the person our AI Engineers, AI Consultants, and client teams turn to when the experience layer of an engagement is the hardest part of the problem, and when trustworthy, responsible AI needs an interface people actually trust. You'll operate at the intersection of individual client engagements - spanning DAX corporations to leading “Mittelstand” businesses - and appliedAI's broader design practice, working closely with adjacent teams such as Change & Enablement and Trustworthy AI to turn deep UX expertise into real-world impact. Your tasks will include:Own the user experience strategy across our most demanding client AI engagements - from discovery and early concept through validated, handover-ready designs that clients' engineering teams can build with confidenceShape UX and CX strategy across engagements - framing the actual problem before a single screen is designed, running discovery and moderated research sessions with operators, planners, and engineers, so design decisions rest on evidence rather than opinionDefine the interaction patterns agentic systems need - human-in-the-loop approval, latency and status communication, source attribution, uncertainty and error states, and safe defaults for irreversible actionsSet the standard for how we design and modernize complex, operationally critical systems - dense data, high stakes, long-lived workflows, and users who cannot afford to guess what the system just didDrive adoption of shared design systems and component libraries across engagements - specifications and patterns that make the next project faster, not a slide deck about consistencyEstablish DesignOps and design governance across our project portfolio - methodologies, review rituals, and quality bars that scale experience maturity across multi-stakeholder programs, with accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA / EN 301 549) as a non-negotiable design requirement validated in close partnership with engineeringOwn and evolve appliedAI's experience and design standards across the whole professional services organization, and raise the craft bar through review, critique, and mentoring Your profileExtensive experience, typically 10+ years, in experience design and design leadership, including leading or growing a multidisciplinary UX/design practice, with deep command of the end-to-end product design process from research through detailed interaction and visual designComfortable working at the boundary with engineering and being able to translate a design system into implementation-ready specifications and hold a high bar in review, without needing to ship production code yourselfA track record designing for complex, data-dense, operationally critical enterprise systems like industrial, infrastructure, control-room or comparable environments, delivered inside multi-stakeholder programsProven experience establishing DesignOps, governance models, and design m