Director of Design

Description

As the Director of Design at CircleCI, you will lead our design team and shape our overall creative vision and design strategy to deliver developers a first-class, consumer-grade, user experience. You will work closely with product management, engineering, marketing, and other key stakeholders to create an exceptional experience that aligns with our business goals. This role requires a leader with a deep understanding of design principles, a passion for user-centric design, and the ability to inspire and mentor a team of talented designers.

What You’ll Do

• Direct the product design, visual design, and UX Research design functions to align the talent, tools, and processes with the business goals and product strategy.
• Bring a first-class, consumer-grade, user experience to developers.
• Use your knowledge of best practices to lead a design team across the full product life cycle, from user research to requirements refinement to prototyping and ultimately to production product
• Work with Engineering, Product Management, and Marketing to translate business strategies into actionable products and design deliverables.
• Become deeply immersed in the developer ecosystem and understand developer problems.
• Understand and measure the metrics that drive business success and the impact of the design team's work.
• Practice a highly efficient, iterative design process to support the vision.
• Get hands-on by rapidly developing user flows, wireframes, mockups, etc. as needed.
• Attract, inspire, mentor, and grow top design talent while building a culture that elevates performance.
• Improve the operational model to increase team effectiveness.
• Create a culture of craft, quality, and execution by inspiring and leading product designers across experience levels.

Who You Are (Must Have) 

• 10+ years of experience in designing user experiences and interaction design for rich, interactive consumer or enterprise applications, with a minimum of 5 years managing and leading design and research teams.
• Thrives in a fast-paced product environment
• Experience in building and designing tools that are productivity enhancements for teams, preferably for the developer ecosystem.
• A proactive problem solver with a strong bias towards action and curiosity to go beyond the job description.
• A proven track record in bringing a user focus to high-impact, high-visibility projects.
• A respected people manager with high EQ, and excellent storytelling and communication skills.
• A strong portfolio showcasing problem-solving skills at a large scale and high design caliber.
• Ability to lead the design of complex systems of interactions across web, mobile, and API touchpoints.
• Ability to quickly grasp and distill highly complex user design issues into clean, understandable solutions
• Ability to lead, coach, inspire, and motivate a team to create and deliver truly remarkable work
• Ability to attract and recruit exceptional talent
• Demonstrated understanding of user-centered design skills, disciplines, and principles as well as an eye for subtle detail
• Experience facilitating workshops and brainstorming sessions