Product Design Lead, Workforce Management (Mobile)

About the role

Nearly half of the U.S. workforce is hourly: healthcare workers, retail associates, manufacturing teams, restaurant staff, and more. These are the people who keep the world running, and serving them is one of Rippling's largest and most important bets.

For hourly employees and their managers, mobile isn't a secondary surface - it's the surface. These employees aren't opening laptops. They're checking their schedule on a break, approving shift swaps from the parking lot, clocking out from their phone. If the mobile experience isn't excellent, the product fails for this entire customer segment.

This role owns the full Time mobile experience plus the Timeclock app, which means full ownership of two high-usage products. The design constraints are challenging: you need to be fast, clear, and compliant in a context where attention is minimal and stakes are high. Additionally, Rippling is making a deliberate push to bring AI-powered workflows to employees, not just admins, and Mobile is where that lands for hourly workers. Since Time is the biggest driver of Rippling app usage, the quality bar this person sets will raise our mobile standards across the board.

As a designer on this team, you will work on some of Rippling's most important product problems. You will define ambiguous opportunities, shape product direction, prototype deeply, and own outcomes end-to-end. Designers at Rippling are product builders, and AI is part of how we build: from early thinking to prototyping to what ships to customers.

What you will do

• Design exceptional mobile-first product experiences for modern workforce management - including clock-in/out flows, schedule views, shift swaps, break tracking, timecard approvals, and the Timeclock kiosk app.
• Define what great mobile looks like at Rippling by establishing patterns, interaction standards, and quality benchmarks that extend beyond Time into the broader platform.
• Get close to customers to understand how managers and admins actually run hourly teams: where workflows break, where complexity hides, and where better design can drive real business impact.
• Design scalable capabilities and platform patterns that work for multiple products, customer segments, and use cases, creating coherent experiences across Rippling's broader platform.
• Use AI as a core part of your design process to clarify problem spaces, generate and refine requirements, explore edge cases, and pressure-test solutions before they reach production.
• Develop a hands-on understanding of evolving AI capabilities by building with it, and bringing the knowledge into your product and design decision.
• Prototype with AI-assisted tools to make ideas tangible quickly, explore realistic interactions, and validate solutions through working flows rather than static mocks alone.

What you will need

• 6+ years of end-to-end product design experience, with a portfolio demonstrating strong mobile craft and complex product delivery.
• Active use of LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, or similar) in your design workflow, whether for research, requirements, copy, or exploration.
• Comfort with AI-assisted prototyping tools (Cursor, Claude Code, or similar), even if you're not writing production code.
• A strong eye for craft, both interaction and visual, with the ability to set a high bar and drive quality across teams.
• Exceptional communication skills, making abstract concepts understandable and guiding cross-functional partners through decisions.
• A relentless customer focus and desire to dig deep to understand real user needs and translate them into design decisions that solve real problems.

Additional Information

Rippling highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. For office-based employees (employees who live within a defined radius of a Rippling office), Rippling considers working in the office, at least three days a week under current policy, to be an essential function of the employee's role.

Pay and benefits

This role will receive a competitive salary + benefits + equity. The salary for US-based employees will be aligned with one of the ranges below based on location; see which tier applies to your location here.

A variety of factors are considered when determining someone's compensation-including a candidate's professional background, experience, and location. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed below.