JOB SUMMARYThe Principal Experience Designer owns the unified digital design experience across NCL's digital guest journey: Shop, Book, Presail, Onboard, and Next Cruise. This role partners with the Sr. Product Owners who own each journey stage, plus the Principal Content Strategist and the Principal Experimentation Strategist, to ensure every guest touchpoint reflects one consistent, brand-anchored digital design standard rather than a patchwork of stage-specific solutions. As a subject matter expert in digital design, this role sets and advises on digital design direction across the organization rather than managing a design team.
POSITION RESPONSIBILITIES- Own the end-to-end digital design vision and digital design standards for NCL's digital guest journey across web, app, and CRM touchpoints, ensuring consistency and brand fidelity from Shop through Next Cruise.
- Serve as the subject matter expert on digital experience design, advising the Sr. Product Owners on how to translate journey-specific business goals into cohesive, guest-centered digital design solutions.
- Partner with the Technology team to ensure digital design standards and guidelines are technically feasible and consistently implemented across platforms.
- Advise the Principal Experimentation Strategist on digital design validation priorities and interpret consumer testing results to guide digital design decisions.
- Establish and govern digital design standards, components, and guidelines that scale consistently across all stages of the guest journey: Shop, Book, Presail, Onboard, and Next Cruise.
- Champion the Digital Guest Promise of personalized, relevant, one-voice experiences in every digital design decision.
- Provide digital design expertise and mentorship to designers embedded across the Product, Content, Technology, and partner teams, without direct management responsibility for those individuals.
QUALIFICATIONSDEGREE TYPE: Bachelor's Degree
FIELD(S) OF STUDY: Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Visual Communication Design, or a related field
EXPERIENCE- 7+ years of experience in digital/UX experience design, including at least 3 years operating at a senior or principal level setting design direction across multiple products or teams.
- Demonstrated experience designing complex, multi-channel digital guest or customer journeys spanning web, mobile app, and CRM touchpoints.
- Experience establishing and governing design systems, style guides, or component libraries used across multiple product teams.
- Experience working within a large, matrixed organization, collaborating across product, content, marketing, and technology functions to deliver a unified experience.
- Experience partnering directly with engineering and technology teams to translate design standards into technically feasible, production-ready solutions.
- Experience in travel, hospitality, cruise, retail, or another high-consideration, multi-step purchase industry strongly preferred.
- Experience guiding or mentoring other designers in a non-supervisory capacity, such as through design reviews, critique, or informal coaching.
COMPETENCIES & SKILLS- Strong portfolio demonstrating guest or customer-centered digital design outcomes tied to measurable business results such as conversion, engagement, retention, or revenue.
- Expert-level knowledge of user experience and user interface design principles, interaction design, information architecture, and accessibility standards.
- Proficiency with modern design and prototyping tools (for example Figma, Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite) and familiarity with how design systems are implemented in code.
- Ability to influence and align stakeholders across product, content, technology, and executive teams without formal authority, through data, storytelling, and design rationale.
- Strong analytical skills, including the ability to interpret consumer research, usability testing, and behavioral data to inform design decisions.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to present and defend design direction to senior leadership and cross-functional partners.
- Familiarity with AI-enhanced personalization, SEO/AEO/GEO discoverability, and mobile commerce design patterns.
- Comfort operating in ambiguity, balancing long-term design vision with the practical constraints of a phased, multi-year digital transformation program.
- Strong collaboration and coaching orientation, with the ability to guide and elevate the work of designers embedded on other teams without direct management authority.
