Design Lead Job Description

About the role

We are hiring a Design Lead to raise the bar on our product design and mentor a small but growing team. You will still design, but you will spend just as much time reviewing work, unblocking designers, and aligning stakeholders on direction. This role is ideal for someone who has moved past pure execution and now gets energy from making a whole team better.

Key responsibilities

• Set and uphold the design quality bar across the team
• Mentor designers and run structured design critiques
• Align product, engineering, and stakeholders on design direction

Day-to-day responsibilities

• Run weekly design critiques and give specific, actionable feedback on flows and visuals
• Own the design system and enforce consistency across product surfaces
• Pair with product managers to translate roadmap goals into design briefs
• Lead discovery and design sprints for ambiguous, high-impact problems
• Set expectations for Figma file hygiene, handoff specs, and documentation
• Coach individual designers through career growth plans and skill gaps
• Present design rationale to leadership and defend trade-offs with evidence
• Partner with engineering leads to keep designs feasible within sprint capacity
• Establish research and usability testing rituals so decisions stay user-led
• Balance your own IC design work with reviewing and directing the team's output

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in design, HCI, or a related field, or equivalent portfolio experience
• 6 or more years in product or UX design, with 2 or more mentoring or leading designers
• A portfolio showing shipped products and clear before-and-after impact
• Demonstrated fluency running critiques and coaching designers to grow
• Track record partnering with product and engineering to ship on schedule