Director, AI Experience Design Lead

Pfizer • New York City, NY

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

At Pfizer, our mission is to create breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. As part of the Customer Experience function in the Chief Technologist Organization, we are seeking a Director, AI Experience Design Lead to own how Pfizer’s AI looks, sounds, and behaves, and to build and lead the design team that ships it. Pfizer is putting AI in front of 80,000 colleagues and every surface needs to feel like it came from the same company. This role owns that consistency as a product: the AI-first design system behind human and agent experiences. It defines what colleagues see, what agents say, how uncertainty gets disclosed, and how regulated content behaves. The deliverables are working systems: tokens, patterns, and standards that live in MCP and flow into the build pipeline, so engineers and the Design QA Agent get the correct pattern by default and teams build compliant experiences without waiting on review cycles. The Director is accountable for the system the way a product owner is accountable for a product: adoption in code, pattern reuse, override rates, and first-pass compliance are the scoreboard. When telemetry shows a pattern failing, the Director retires it. This role is designed for a highly experienced design leader who brings exceptional executive presence, narrative storytelling ability, and political acumen, while remaining deeply hands-on and invested in growing the people on their team: a player-coach who ships production design work alongside the team and leads complex, high-stakes design initiatives across Pfizer’s AI platforms and enterprise LLM integrations. This is a Director-level role combining people leadership with deep individual contribution. The Director works across every modality the platforms speak (screens, conversation, voice, and agent-to-agent interaction) and moves fluidly between shipping production design work, delivering design standards as code, and growing the team. Deep technical understanding of how LLMs, agents, and modern product stacks behave anchors the role’s credibility with Engineering and Product.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree required
• 8+ years of progressive experience in Experience Design, UX, or Product Design, with a proven track record of delivering complex, high-impact digital products and experiences in enterprise or highly matrixed environments.
• 5+ years of direct people management experience, including hiring, developing, and leading high-performing design teams.
• Working fluency with front-end development principles, APIs, and design-token pipelines, sufficient to partner with Engineering on delivering design standards as code.
• Experience owning and evolving design systems and AI-first interaction patterns at scale to ensure scalability, consistency, and quality.
• Deep expertise in AI-driven experience design, including hands-on experience designing Agentic AI workflows and Conversational UX (chat and/or voice), such as dialog flows, conversation state management, repair and fallback patterns, escalation models, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Advanced understanding of how AI systems behave, communicate, and build trust, including experience designing transparency cues, explainability patterns, refusal behaviors, safety guardrails, and responsible AI interaction models.
• Exceptional design judgment and craft excellence, with the ability to independently produce end-to-end design work from problem framing through high-fidelity, interactive, and executive-ready prototypes.
• Outstanding executive communication and storytelling skills, including the ability to clearly articulate, justify, and defend design decisions to senior leadership and diverse stakeholder groups.
• Expertise in accessibility and inclusive design, with hands-on experience ensuring WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across digital products and platforms.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to synthesize qualitative and quantitative inputs into clear design direction and actionable insights.
• A robust portfolio demonstrating system-level thinking, AI-powered experiences, and rapid prototyping approaches, including design standards or components shipped as production code.
• Strong digital literacy and an "AI-first" mental model, with the ability to critically evaluate and integrate generative tools into the creative process to solve complex design challenges at scale
• Ability to manage multiple complex programs and projects simultaneously
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Permanent work authorization in the United States.

Nice To Haves

• MBA or advanced degree in a related field preferred.
• Strong product design experience (not only UI): partnering with Product/Engineering to shape scope, prioritize tradeoffs, and define measurable outcomes.
• Hands-on building with LLM APIs or agent frameworks to prototype real agent behavior in code, not only static interfaces.
• Advanced prompt engineering skills, using prompts as detailed creative briefs that set parameters, constraints, and brand identity.
• Expertise in working within lean or agile environments with fast-paced, iterative product cycles.
• Track record of building design teams from the ground up, including hiring, onboarding, and career-pathing frameworks.
• Experience with AI experience evaluation approaches: conversation quality testing, scenario-based risk testing, and iterative improvement loops tied to product metrics.
• A recognized authority in interaction, visual, and conversation design; independently produces work from ambiguous brief to production-ready execution.
• Operates where design and engineering converge; ships tokens, patterns, and standards as code and engages engineers on implementation tradeoffs.
• Deep working knowledge of how LLMs and agentic systems behave; designs trustworthy, transparent, and explainable experiences and anticipates failure modes.
• Communicates design rationale from engineering standups to executive forums and translates complex AI and design concepts into decisions leaders can act on.
• Turns ambiguous, high-stakes briefs into clear design problems; the go-to person for the least defined design challenges on Pfizer’s AI platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own, extend, and evolve Pfizer’s AI-first design system across human and agent surfaces: the single source of truth for how Pfizer’s AI looks, sounds, and behaves.
• Deliver design standards as code: tokens, patterns, and components shipped into the engineering build pipeline so the correct, compliant pattern is the default, with accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) built in.
• Track adoption in code (pattern usage, override rate, exception requests) and retire patterns the data shows are not working.
• Connect design outcomes to measurable KPIs: adoption, task success, trust, time-to-resolution, and first-pass compliance.
• Set the design bar by shipping: work in the new AI tools first, put innovative work on the table, and show the team how the craft is done now.
• Independently own end-to-end design execution for high-impact, ambiguous initiatives, from problem framing through high-fidelity, interactive, and executive-ready prototypes.
• Act as the design authority for Agentic AI experiences, including systems that plan, reason, invoke tools, and execute multi-step workflows with humans in the loop.
• Own Conversational UX end-to-end (chat and/or voice), including dialog flows, conversation state, error recovery, escalation, and safe fallback behaviors.
• Define assistant behaviors such as tone and voice, refusal patterns, transparency cues, and explainability, designing for edge cases and failure modes in regulated contexts.
• Partner closely with AI, Data, Product, and Engineering teams to co-own LLM-enabled products that balance autonomy, usability, safety, and trust.
• Maintain an exceptional design bar across interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, product thinking, and storytelling.
• Serve as a trusted design advisor to Product, Engineering, and Executive stakeholders across the Chief Technologist Organization’s platform teams and translate complex design and AI concepts into decisions leaders can act on.
• Support product vision and roadmap prioritization, helping Product and Engineering partners evaluate which AI capabilities to build, sequence, or sunset based on user value and experience impact.
• Build, lead, and grow a high-performing team of experience designers: hiring bar, roles and levels, growth paths, and the full talent lifecycle; mentor direct reports by modeling the craft in their own work.
• Own the team’s operating budget and staffing across platforms and initiatives; partner with Finance on annual planning.
• Leads the practice’s exploration of new design tools and methods; experiments in the open and brings validated techniques into the team’s standard ways of working.
• Models the craft daily; ships production design work that sets the bar for the team and shows, rather than tells, how AI-first design gets done.
• Makes decisions without waiting for a laid-out plan; gathers just enough context and starts making, improvises around missing inputs, and corrects course with evidence from the work itself.
• Holds a strong, defensible point of view on visual and interaction style; treats typography, motion, tone, and interaction detail as the product rather than the polish.
• Takes accountability for experience quality and adoption on every surface the design system touches; treats pattern reuse and first-pass compliance as the team’s scoreboard.
• Works fluently across design, engineering, and AI; translates between design intent and technical implementation and builds the team’s depth beyond a single specialty.
• Sets the standard for spec-driven design communication; presents design rationale clearly to audiences from engineers to senior leadership.
• Designs patterns once so they scale across every platform and agent surface; connects design decisions to how the whole experience, organization, and platform behave together.
• The ability to influence and collaborate with peers, develop and coach others, oversee and guide the work of other colleagues to achieve meaningful outcomes and create business impact.

Benefits

• 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions
• Additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution
• Paid vacation
• Paid holiday and personal days
• Paid caregiver/parental and medical leave
• Health benefits to include medical, prescription drug, dental and vision coverage.
• Relocation assistance may be available based on business needs and/or eligibility.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director