Design Lead - Data Platform

FormativGroup•Austin, TX

About The Position

FormativGroup is seeking a Design Lead to own product design for an early-stage, data-dense platform built for regulated enterprises. This role involves developing a perimeter-safe data lineage and migration impact-analysis platform. The position is described as a "build" opportunity, with the product becoming a standalone business. It's not solely a UI/UX role; the Design Lead will act as a product manager, focusing on customer problems, shaping the product's direction, and simplifying complex technical information.

Requirements

Senior or lead-level product design experience in enterprise, B2B SaaS, or similarly complex product environments.
Strong product thinking; you have influenced what gets built and why, not only how it looks.
A portfolio with complex, data-dense interfaces made simple: dashboards, graphs, visualizations, technical workflows, or enterprise tools.
Strong information-design and data-visualization instincts.
End-to-end ownership of a design system, from components and standards through adoption and maintenance.
Fluency working directly with product and engineering teams, with examples of taking ideas from zero to shipped.
Experience building a design function, practice, or product design standard from scratch.
AI fluency, with concrete examples of how you use AI in real design work and the results it produced.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing for technical users such as developers, data engineers, analysts, or platform teams.
Familiarity with lineage, graph visualization, data governance, migration impact analysis, or metadata products.
Exposure to regulated-industry products such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, or government.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end product design vision for a data-dense enterprise platform.
Translate complex lineage, migration impact, governance, and blast-radius workflows into clear, navigable product experiences.
Partner closely with Product and Engineering to define what gets built, for whom, and why.
Design for two audiences at once: technical users who need depth and senior stakeholders who need confidence in decisions.
Build and maintain the design system, set the quality bar, and create repeatable standards for future product surfaces.
Run user discovery and research; turn what you learn into product direction, design decisions, and prioritization input.
Use AI across the design workflow, including research synthesis, ideation, prototyping, iteration, and productivity.