Principal, AI and Design Operations

Area of focus: AI and Design Operations

At Valley Bank, we believe in people’s growth potential. We invest in it. We protect it. We focus it. For nearly 100 years, we’ve been the Bank that clients from every industry turn to for our expertise, strategies, and advice–building the kind of trust that can fuel every goal. We are the leading relationship bank built for growth–with over $60 billion in assets, 3,800 experts, and more than 200 consumer branches and commercial banking offices in communities across the US.

At Valley, we’re all driven by an ambition that goes deeper than just having a job. That’s why when you work for us, we make it our goal to help you focus on what drives you–working to turn your passions and strengths into assets you can use to propel your ambitions and build the professional legacy you want. Because when we say we’re a relationship bank built for growth, that’s not just reserved for our clients–that includes all our associates as well.

About The Role Most design organizations are still figuring out how AI changes the work. At Valley, we want to get ahead of that question rather than answer it reactively. We are looking for a Principal Designer, AI and Design Operations to do two things simultaneously: build the internal practice that defines how our design organization works with AI, and establish the design standards and patterns that govern how our customers experience AI across Valley’s products.

This is a senior individual contributor role with org-wide scope. You will not be embedded on a single product team—you will be the person who decides how Valley’s designers use AI in their daily workflows, which tools get adopted and how, what standards govern AI-generated or AI-assisted design work, and what patterns the entire design organization reaches for when building AI-powered customer experiences.

If you have been frustrated working in organizations where AI is treated as a feature to bolt on rather than a fundamental shift in how design is practiced, this is the role where you get to set it up right from the beginning.

What You Will Do

AI Design Practice and Standards

• Establish Valley’s foundational point of view on how AI-powered experiences should be designed: how the bank presents AI to customers, how it signals confidence and uncertainty, how it earns trust, and how it handles the moments when AI reaches its limits
• Define and maintain a library of AI-specific UX patterns and components covering states unique to AI interactions including uncertainty, partial information, explanation, correction, and human handoff
• Work closely with the Lead Conversational Designer to align on how visual and conversational AI experiences connect, particularly around trust signals, error states, and escalation patterns
• Bring design risk into AI product decisions early, including the experience implications of hallucination, over-reliance, and the ways AI outputs can mislead customers even when technically accurate

Design Operations and Team Enablement

• Build and own the operational infrastructure of Valley’s design organization: tools, workflows, standards, and the systems that allow designers to do their best work consistently and at scale
• Evaluate, pilot, and establish guidelines for AI-powered design tools across the team’s workflow, covering ideation, prototyping, content generation, and design system maintenance
• Develop clear standards for how designers at Valley use AI assistance in their work, including quality expectations, disclosure practices, and the craft judgment that AI tools cannot replace
• Create and maintain onboarding materials, playbooks, and shared resources that allow new designers to get up to speed quickly and existing designers to continue developing their practice

Design Systems and Quality Infrastructure

• Own the AI components layer of Valley’s design system, ensuring patterns are documented, accessible, and maintained as the underlying technology and customer expectations evolve
• Establish quality standards and review processes for AI-powered experiences that go beyond visual polish to include legibility, trust, and the harder-to-measure dimensions of how customers understand and relate to AI
• Define measurement frameworks for design quality across the organization including how the team tracks consistency, accessibility, and the effectiveness of AI experience patterns over time

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