did the xAI designer loop in late 2025, thought i'd post since there's basically nothing on what design hiring looks like there.
background: 8 years in design, agency then product. mostly consumer-facing stuff. i applied for a product design role working on Grok's interface.
the recruiter screen honest and a little blunt in a good way. they said the design team is tiny, the role is high-leverage, and you'll be expected to do research, interaction design, and sometimes write the UI copy yourself. no separate writer. this tells you everything about what they want: a generalist who can ship, not a specialist who needs a full pod.
portfolio review (60 min) shared my screen and walked through three projects. they interrupted constantly, which i actually appreciated. the questions were always about process and decision-making, not aesthetics. 'why did you go with this navigation pattern over X', 'what did the research show that changed your direction', 'what would you do differently now'. be ready to speak to the mistakes and pivots, not just the wins. one of my cases involved a design i'm still not fully happy with and i said so. they seemed to like that more than the cases where everything worked out.
they asked specifically how i work with engineers: do i do redlines, figma dev mode, pair sessions, something else. they want designers who reduce back-and-forth, not add to it.
design exercise (take-home, 4 hour time-box) they gave me a prompt related to improving a specific interaction in an AI assistant interface. can't say more without making it obvious. it was intentionally vague. the point is you have to define the problem yourself before solving it. i spent the first hour doing a quick user model writeup, then went into solution space. they explicitly said: show your process, not just a polished mockup. i submitted in figma with annotated frames and a short loom walkthrough.
debrief round walked through my exercise solution with two designers and a PM. they probed assumptions and suggested alternative framings. i had to defend choices without being defensive, which is the hardest skill in design reviews.
what i'd tell someone prepping: don't over-polish the exercise. they want to see how you think, not just what you make. know figma cold: auto-layout, variables, dev mode handoff. have opinions about AI product design specifically. what's broken about current chatbot UIs, what you'd fix. this isn't a nice-to-have, you're literally going to be designing for an AI product. understand what 'high-leverage design' means at a small company vs a large one. fewer stakeholders but also no safety net.
i ended up declining to move forward due to comp structure but the loop itself was one of the better ones i've done this cycle.