SINCE 2026
Perplexity
Head of Design
- Elevated aesthetic, critical approach
- Consumer mobile at platform scale
- Design and code, fused
- Studio bench to design chair
Head of Design · Perplexity · Brooklyn, NY
Sebastian Chen Speier
Brooklyn, New York
Craft governed by logic, from sneaker drops to the AI answer engine.
Sebastian Chen Speier heads design at Perplexity, the AI answer engine, where his brief is how a machine-generated answer earns trust by showing its sources. He came up through the agency bench — Tribal DDB, SapientNitro, Huge, then This Also inside Google's Creative Lab — before leading design for Nike SNKRS, Instagram, Airbnb, and Shopify. His honours BFA fused graphic design with computation arts, and he taught graduate communication design at Parsons for two years while working full-time.
- 1 yrMember of Design Staff to Head of Design, Perplexity
- 5 yrsStaff Designer to Senior Design Manager, Shopify
- 56Graphic Design skill endorsements
- 7 moExperience Design Lead to Manager, Airbnb
HAPPENING NOW
STANDING TODAY
HOW HE THINKS4 BELIEFS
Four convictions stayed fixed as the work grew from pixels to products to teams.
THE IMPACT
The design chair on the defining consumer product of each era — pull one out.
EVERYTHING ELSE · 7 WORKS
THE TIMELINE
He kept the design chair on the consumer product each era was built around.
The whole record, newest first – tap any moment and Aster tells the story.
2025–PRESENT
Designing the AI answer engine
Speier joined Perplexity's design team in May 2025 and became Head of Design a year later, in May 2026. He owns design for a consumer product whose core interaction — a question producing a synthesized, cited answer — is still being invented industry-wide, the most greenfield brief of his career and the culmination of the consumer-mobile discipline he practiced at Instagram, Airbnb, and Shopify.
2020–2025
Scaling commerce design and teaching the next class
At Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of merchant storefronts, Speier ran a full five-year arc inside one company: Staff Designer, then Design Manager, then Senior Design Manager. It is his longest single-company tenure and the place his management skillset was built. He held it partly alongside a two-year adjunct professorship in Communication Design at Parsons.
2018–2020
Product design at the top of the consumer feed
Straight out of Nike, Speier moved into top-tier big-tech product design: Product Design Lead at Instagram from the New York office, then Experience Design Lead to Design Manager at Airbnb in about seven months. This is the pivot from brand and creative leadership to product design leadership on mainstream consumer apps — the discipline he would later name as his specialty.
“When I first got hired at Airbnb, he was honest, transparent, and it didn't feel like he was just pretending to be my friend … he didn't play games. His direct approach was to give me the best package right away and it worked.”
2016–2018
Sneaker culture, brand, and the drop
Out of Nike's New York digital studio, Speier held two concurrent senior roles: Global Design Director for SNKRS, Nike's sneaker-launch app that stages limited drops, and Head of Design & Brand for the S23NYC studio. For over a year he owned platform design and studio design-and-brand at once — his peak brand-plus-product chapter, at the center of one of the most design-sensitive consumer communities anywhere.
2001–2016
From art school to the creative lab bench
A Canadian, cross-disciplinary formation — sociology and photography in Vancouver, then an honours BFA fusing graphic design with computation arts at Concordia (2003–2007). He built up through Toronto and New York agencies (Tribal DDB, Trapeze, SapientNitro, Huge) and reached a creative-lab peak as Creative Lead on Google's re-brand, embedded in Google's Creative Lab through the agency This Also.
“He understands good design principles, and is often an advocate of good design and good typography when other developers will push back on creative demands. Teddy understands the importance of a good looking product, and doesn't let laziness, or difficulty control his output.”