Lead Conversation Designer (Automotive)
Team: Design / Conversational Experience
Location: Kolkata or Bangalore
Type: Full-time A UI/UX design leadership role centered on conversational AI. Owns the end-to-end in-cabin user experience.
About Mihup
Mihup is an enterprise Voice AI platform powering contact centers and automotive, with our own ASR, NLU, TTS, wake-word, Private LLM, and G2P models built for India's linguistic reality — 20+ Indian languages with heavy Hindi-English code-mixing, accents, and dialects. We serve 500+ enterprises, our in-car assistant ships with OEMs like Tata Motors, and in early 2026 we partnered with Qualcomm to run voice AI directly on-device on the Snapdragon Digital Chassis. We build our models in-house, end to end.
The Role
We're hiring a design leader to own the entire conversational and interaction experience of Mihup's in-car voice assistant. You'll define who the assistant is, how it talks, and how voice works together with the screen and the wider cabin — so that every interaction feels natural, effortless, safe, and delightful for drivers and passengers, across 20+ Indian languages.
This is a UI/UX role at its core, applied to conversational AI. You'll blend conversation design, voice UX, and multimodal interaction design, and you'll be the person responsible for enhancing the in-cabin experience end to end — from the assistant's persona and dialog to onboarding, discovery, and everything a user hears and sees.
If you have a UI/UX pedigree and you've shipped a conversational AI product, and you want to shape how people talk to their cars, this is that role.
What You'll Do
- Design end-to-end conversation flows for in-car tasks — navigation, media, climate, calls, vehicle controls, and proactive assistance — including turn-taking, prompts, confirmations, and graceful error recovery and repair.
- Define and steward the assistant's persona and voice — its personality, tone, and character — and keep it consistent and culturally natural across 20+ Indian languages and code-mixed speech (transcreation, not literal translation).
- Own the multimodal in-cabin experience: coordinate voice with the IVI screen, instrument cluster, HUD, and ambient/haptic feedback so the whole cabin feels like one coherent experience.
- Design for safety and low cognitive load — hands-free, eyes-free interaction that minimizes driver distraction, following automotive HMI and driver-distraction guidelines.
- Craft all conversational content and microcopy — prompts, responses, onboarding, discovery, and help — and the patterns and guidelines others follow.
- Design the full user journey: onboarding, feature discovery (helping users learn what they can say), personalization, and proactive, context-aware assistance.
- Partner tightly with the GenAI/LLM, NLU, and TTS teams — shape system prompts and behavior, define intents and entities from a UX lens, and guide how the assistant should sound (pacing, prosody, expressiveness).
- Run user research and usability testing — including in-vehicle or simulated-driving sessions — analyze real conversation logs to find friction, and iterate continuously.
- Prototype and communicate designs — flows, sample dialogs, and interactive prototypes — and align OEM / Tier-1 partners and internal teams around them.
- Establish the conversation-design system: patterns, standards, and documentation that scale across features, languages, and vehicle programs.
KPIs You'll Own
- Task-completion / success rate for in-cabin interactions
- User satisfaction (CSAT) and perceived naturalness and ease of use
- Driver-distraction and safety measures (glance time, hands-free success)
- Adoption and engagement — feature discovery and repeat use
- Error-recovery / repair success — how gracefully misunderstandings are handled
- Consistency and quality of the experience across languages
What We're Looking For (Required)
- A strong UI/UX design pedigree with hands-on experience designing a conversational AI product — voice assistant, chatbot, or similar.
- Proven conversation design / VUI design skills: dialog flows, prompt and response writing, persona design, and error handling.
- Excellent writing and microcopy craft — conversation design is fundamentally writing.
- Solid UX fundamentals: user research, usability testing, information architecture, and interaction design.
- Experience designing multimodal experiences (voice together with screen).
- A working understanding of conversational AI / LLM capabilities and limits, enough to design feasible, grounded experiences.
- A portfolio demonstrating shipped conversational or voice experiences.
- The ability to lead design direction and collaborate across engineering, product, and external partners.
Nice to Have (Preferred)
- Automotive / in-car HMI experience and familiarity with driver-distraction and cognitive-load guidelines.
- Designing across multiple languages / localization — ideally Indic and code-mixed — including transcreation of persona and tone.
- Familiarity with prototyping and conversation-design tools (Figma; Voiceflow or similar).
- Experience with LLM-based / generative assistants — prompt design and guardrails from a UX perspective.
- A track record collaborating closely with ASR, NLU, and TTS teams.
Why This Role
- Own the whole experience. You define the persona, the conversation, and the entire cabin interaction of an assistant shipping with OEMs like Tata Motors — not a single screen.
- Shape a new design space. How millions of drivers and passengers talk to their cars, by voice, across 20+ Indian languages, is largely uncharted.
- A rare design mandate: voice-first, multimodal, safety-critical, and multilingual — with real users in real cars.
- Design meets frontier GenAI, with an engineering team that can actually build what you design.