Design Director, Product Design & AI (m/f/d)

Edenspiekermann•Los Angeles, CA

1d•$120,000 - $150,000•Remote

About The Position

We are Edenspiekermann, an independent design consultancy with 40+ years of experience helping world-leading organizations invent, build, and evolve their products. We are looking for a hands-on Design Director to join our US team in a permanent, remote-first role based in Southern California. You will work primarily from home and be available to travel to client sites across the United States as engagements require. You will lead complex digital-product and design-system engagements across our portfolio, including work in regulated industries and global medical technology. AI will be a core part of how you explore, prototype, make decisions, and help teams deliver better work. This is a senior client-facing role for someone who is excited by how AI is changing design and product development. You will set direction, stay close to the work, and help clients move from isolated experiments to useful AI-enabled products, workflows, and operating models. You will combine curiosity and speed with strong judgment about where human craft, review, and accountability matter.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in product design, UX/UI design, or design systems, including several years leading complex client or enterprise engagements.
Portfolio demonstrates systems thinking, refined visual craft, shipped digital products, and credible AI-enabled work.
Led design systems across multiple products, platforms, brands, or teams and understand how they connect to Figma libraries, production code, documentation, versioning, and engineering adoption.
Experience in a regulated or high-accountability environment and treat accessibility as a system requirement.
Can lead senior client conversations, facilitate difficult decisions, and turn ambiguity into a practical path forward with curiosity, judgment, and a collaborative, low-ego attitude.
Actively use generative and agentic AI in your own practice, can demonstrate workflows beyond surface-level prompting, and can separate useful applications from hype.
Communicate fluently in English and are comfortable collaborating across US and European teams.
Based in Southern California, willing and able to travel to client sites across the United States as engagements require, and legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Responsibilities

Lead client engagements end-to-end, from initial framing and design direction through delivery, adoption, and continuous improvement.
Translate user needs, business goals, brand intent, accessibility, engineering, content, and compliance requirements into clear product and system direction.
Own the design quality of the work, balancing strategic clarity with strong visual, interaction, and systems-design craft.
Direct the creation and evolution of scalable Figma libraries, component architectures, variables, tokens, themes, patterns, prototypes, and documentation.
Work closely with product and engineering leaders to connect design decisions with production code, release processes, and measurable product outcomes.
Establish practical governance and contribution models that support distributed teams without overloading a small central group.
Facilitate workshops and decision-making with senior stakeholders across design, product, engineering, research, content, and compliance.
Guide multidisciplinary teams, coach designers, set a high bar for craft, and give clear, constructive direction.
Make AI part of the design practice every day, using it for research synthesis, ideation, content, prototyping, design-system work, and design-to-code exploration.
Prototype AI-enabled product experiences, including conversational, adaptive, generative, and agentic interactions, then test whether they create meaningful value for people.
Experiment quickly with new tools and models, share what works, and help the team build repeatable AI workflows instead of one-off demos.
Evaluate AI output critically and establish practical guardrails for quality, accessibility, privacy, approved source material, human review, and accountability.
Help shape Edenspiekermann's AI-enabled product and design-systems practice, contributing to how we pitch, deliver, and talk about the work.