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

The 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.

Most 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 confidence
• Shape 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 opinion
• Define 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 actions
• Set 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 did
• Drive adoption of shared design systems and component libraries across engagements - specifications and patterns that make the next project faster, not a slide deck about consistency
• Establish 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 engineering
• Own and evolve appliedAI's experience and design standards across the whole professional services organization, and raise the craft bar through review, critique, and mentoring

Lucas Fernandes - Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist
appliedAI Initiative GmbH, August-Everding-Str. 25, 81671 München