Senior Experiential Designer

About the role

The Sage Group’s client, one of the leading AI companies in the world, is searching for a Sr. Experiential Designer who leads spatial experiences, live shows, immersive venues, brand worlds, and public-facing environments at cultural and commercial scale.

We increasingly meets people in the physical world: developer conferences, customer summits, launch moments, installations, briefing spaces, and the rooms where someone encounters our AI for the first time without a screen between them. This role owns how those encounters are conceived and how they feel.

The idea comes first. Before a floor plan or a fabrication drawing, someone has to decide what an experience is actually arguing — what a person should understand about AI on the way out that they didn't understand on the way in. Our work is abstract by nature: models, safety research, agents that do things you can't see. Abstraction resists a booth. Making it legible, physical, and worth a stranger's attention is a design problem no one has fully solved, and it is the part of this job we are hiring for.

Then you build it. This is a hands-on role. You'll sketch, model, prototype, and test; work through spatial layouts, materials, motion, sound, and light; produce the drawing set; brief fabricators and production partners; and be on site when it goes up. You'll design for how people behave rather than how they're supposed to behave — where they enter, what they touch, where they lose interest, what turns a queue into a conversation, and what a person does when they're standing in a room and unsure whether they're allowed to try something.

You will have unusual material to work with. The subject of the work is a technology you can build with, so the experience can respond, adapt, and speak back rather than only being looked at. Finding out what that makes possible in a physical space is a large part of the role.

Key responsibilities

Set the concept. Take an objective or a rough brief and develop distinct creative directions for it. Establish what an experience means to communicate before deciding what it looks like, this is a strategic and creative role.
Design the behavior, not only the build. Plan the sequence a person moves through: entry, orientation, the moment something clicks, and what they carry out with them. Make the reasoning behind each decision explicit and testable.
Work with your hands. Produce sketches, models, renders, and physical or interactive prototypes. Test them with real people early, and change the idea when the test says to.
See it built. Develop drawing sets and specifications, brief and direct fabricators, AV partners, and production vendors, hold quality through install, and be on site to make the calls that come up on the floor.
Build a language, not one-off moments. Define patterns, principles, and reusable components so our presence is recognizable across events and spaces without becoming repetitive.
Design with AI as a material. Prototype interactive and responsive elements that use our own models, and work out what that changes about a physical experience.
Partner across the company. Work with brand, marketing, communications, research, product, and workplace teams to make sure what a space claims about the technology is accurate.

Qualifications

A portfolio of built experiential/Lab prototypes, environments, exhibits, installations, events, or brand spaces that you can walk through from first concept to what was actually fabricated
Demonstrated conceptual range: you can generate several genuinely different directions for the same brief and articulate why one is right, rather than executing a direction handed to you
Hands-on production craft across spatial design, 3D modeling and visualization, prototyping, and materials, using tools such as Rhino, Blender, Cinema 4D, SketchUp, Figma, or the Adobe Creative Suite
Experience designing for how people move through and behave in a space, and the ability to explain a design decision in terms of the behavior it is intended to produce
Experience working with fabricators, AV and production partners, and vendors from drawing set through install, including on site
The ability to carry a project from an unclear brief to a finished thing without a producer or a creative director to unblock you
Clear written and verbal communication, including presenting a concept to people who don't think visually and making tradeoffs legible to them
A working understanding of AI products and enough fluency to reason about what current models can and cannot do in an interactive setting
You care about our mission and about representing what this technology is honestly to the people who encounter it
Fluency prototyping in code or with AI tools, and experience with interactive, sensor-driven, projection-based, or generative work
Grounding in behavioral or cognitive science, environmental psychology, or another discipline that studies how people respond to designed environments
Experience with technology conferences, keynotes, trade shows, or developer events
Background in museum, exhibition, or narrative environment design or Labs
Experience in retail, hospitality, or workplace environments where the same space serves repeat visitors, immersive theatre.
Depth in an adjacent craft such as motion, sound, lighting, industrial design, or graphic systems
Experience establishing the design language for a program rather than a single moment
Comfort explaining technical subject matter to a general audience without flattening it
Systems design in your output
Travel Requirement: Yes. International and Domestic – Shows
Looking for someone with an understanding of brand global platforms, tech, design and human behavior.
Must understand interactive design, content, film graphics, show design, highly conceptual, modeling, a strategic heavyweight.
Passionate about AI adoption
Desire to BUILD THE EXPERIENCE – this is a broad discipline. Trade shows will not cut it.
Think BIG, like building a half time show, The Olympics, Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, etc
A strategic yet creative thinker
Role at a glance: Strategic pitching of shows, 20% proactive pitch, existing calendar shows

12+ month contract, plus potential contract to hire

Location: Hybrid NYC preferred, open to EST remote

Pay: $200/hr. W2

Portfolio required

The Sage Group

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Senior Experiential Designer