Senior Design Manager

About the role

We are hiring a Senior Design Manager to lead a pod within our design organization, owning both the craft quality and the business outcomes of the work shipped by their team. This is a role for a seasoned design leader — someone who has managed senior designers and design leads, shipped work at scale, and earned the judgement that comes from years of operating inside complex, cross-functional environments. You will manage a team of product designers

embedded across product verticals, partner closely with product, engineering, research, and editorial, and act as a trusted peer to senior leadership across the business. You will report into the Head of Design and play a key role in shaping how design operates as a strategic function within the organization. If you’ve been doing this long enough to know what good looks like —and how to get a team there — then this role is for you.

Responsibilities:

• People Leadership: Manage, coach, and develop a team of product designers. Own career growth, performance conversations, feedback loops, and hiring. Create the conditions where designers do the best work of their careers.
• Craft & Quality: Set and uphold the design quality bar across your pod. Lead critiques, give sharp feedback, and intervene directly on work when it matters. Make sure what ships reflects
• the standard the team is capable of.
• Strategy & Prioritization: Translate company and product strategy into design priorities for your team. Decide what gets worked on, what gets deprioritized, and why — and communicate that clearly upward and downward.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Operate as the senior design partner for product managers, engineering leads, and editorial stakeholders within your pod. Build trust through clarity, judgement, and results — not volume of output.
• Business Outcomes: Own the impact of your team’s work on conversion, engagement, and revenue metrics. Partner with growth and analytics to connect design decisions to measurable outcomes.
• AI-First Practice: Embed AI tooling into your team’s day-to-day workflow — from ideation and prototyping through to production. Help define what “modern design practice” looks like within the organization.
• Process & Rituals: Shape the operating model of the design team — critiques, planning, quality reviews, design-to-engineering handoffs. Improve what isn’t working and protect what is.
• Hands-On Contribution: Step into the work directly when it’s the right call — on the most strategic initiatives, during capacity gaps, or when craft judgement is needed in the room.
• Team Development: Build a culture of feedback, curiosity, and ownership. Run rituals that grow the team’s craft and strategic thinking over time.

Requirements:

• 12+ years of experience in product design, with a minimum of 5 years in a design management or design leadership role.
• Proven experience managing senior designers, staff designers, or design leads — not just junior or mid-level ICs.
• A track record of developing designers into the next stage of their careers.
• Demonstrated ownership of design work that drove significant, measurable business outcomes —conversion, engagement, revenue, or retention — at meaningful scale.
• Deep craft foundation. You can sit in a critique, review a Figma file, and give the kind of sharp, specific feedback that only comes from years of building and shipping product yourself.
• Experience operating as a peer to senior product, engineering, and commercial leader— holding your ground, shaping strategy, and influencing decisions outside the design team.
• Fluency with modern design tooling (Figma, prototyping tools) and a sophisticated understanding of how AI is reshaping product development workflows.
• Ability to articulate design decisions and trade-offs in plain language to executives, PMs, engineers, and commercial stakeholders — and to hold the room when the stakes are high.
• Remote-first experience with strong asynchronous communication habits.
• You bring people together—articulate vision, build alignment, and foster cross-team collaboration through inspiring narrative.

Qualifications:

• Minimum of 12 years experience in product design, with 5+ years in people management
• Proven experience managing senior designers and design leads, not just junior or mid- level ICs
• Portfolio or case studies demonstrating both team outcomes and your own hands-on craft
• Proven ability to coach and develop designers over time.

Nice to haves:

• Experience in marketplace, fintech, comparison, or editorial/media product environments
• Working fluency with AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Figma AI, v0, Lovable) as part of day-to-day practice
• Experience contributing to or governing a design system at scale
• Background in growth, experimentation, or CRO-adjacent design work

Perks:

• Competitive compensation package.
• Fully remote work model
• Day off on the 3rd Friday of every month (one long weekend each month)
• Monthly Wellness Reimbursement Program to promote health well-being
• Monthly Office Commutation Reimbursement Program
• Paid paternity and maternity leaves