We are looking for a Director of UX Design who can do three things at once: 1) lead and develop a small team of designers, 2) establish design governance and related processes that do not exist yet, and 3) work hands-on as an individual contributor designer across product domains. This is a player-coach role. You will build scaffolding (process, rituals) and hold the quality bar, while still practicing your craft as a designer. You will move between big-picture conversations with senior stakeholders, engineering & product partners, and pixel-level critique among your own team. This is a small team inside a large company, working through startup-level ambiguity while solving enterprise-scale problems. What you'll do: Design governance. You will build a review and gating process for proposals to add new components or capabilities to the platform, above the design system execution layer. This requires design credibility and cross-functional standing with individual designers, engineering team, platform leads, and senior stakeholders and leaders. You will not inherit a process. You will build and evolve something new. IC design work. You will collaborate daily with product, engineering, and UX research, contributing hands-on across product and design domains: interaction design, flows, prototypes, visuals, and go-to-market. You are not just setting direction; you are in the work. Product domains include AI-powered HCM workflows and experiences for small business users in payroll, tax, reporting, communications, HR, timekeeping, and so on. People leadership. Manage and develop a small team of designers. Run the critique cadence, enhance collaboration and communication among the team, elevate design quality across the team, and build a culture where rigorous feedback is normal. Create the conditions for your designers to do their best work: clear context, honest assessment, space to grow. Cross-functional influence. Represent the design perspective in product planning, engineering discussions, and leadership reviews. Translate design rationale into communications that resonate with diverse audiences, e.g. technical, non-technical, business stakeholders, and various levels of leadership. When the quality bar is slipping or you're on the receiving end of proposals that don't make sense, you're expected to push back with product and design evidence and market data, not just objection. TO SUCCEED IN THIS ROLE: - You have 10+ years of hands-on UX design experience. - You have led and developed other designers. You know how to give feedback that makes people better while protecting product quality. - You are still an active practitioner. Your portfolio includes IC work you did recently and are proud of, not just work you directed. - You have built or significantly influenced a design governance or review process, and you have gotten technology partners to adopt and use it. - You have strong systems thinking. You see how a component decision ripples throughout the broader product (both existing and future), and can articulate that clearly to people who do not think in terms of design systems. - You are credible in technical conversations. You do not need to write code, but you need to hold your own with product managers, engineers, and platform architects when design and technical constraints are under discussion. - You have successfully, productively integrated GenAI / LLM tooling into your professional workflows and are on top of the latest developments with this technology. - You have designed for AI-powered or agentic products. You understand the specific UX challenges of interfaces where the system acts on the user's behalf and the user needs to trust and verify what happened. - You thrive in lean, ambiguous environments. You are comfortable building process from scratch, without a large team, design ops, or a pre-existing playbook. - Bonus for experience in regulated domains, especially payroll, tax, HR, fintech, healthcare, where user trust and auditability are table stakes. - Extra bonus for having worked and delivered experiences for chat-based products... even moreso for GenAI-powered chat-based products.