Director, AI Experience Design Lead

Pfizer • Collegeville, PA

2d • $176,600 - $294,300 • 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 and shape the AI experience for Pfizer colleagues globally. This includes how Pfizer’s AI looks, sounds, and behaves, and to build and lead the team and design foundation that ships it. Pfizer is putting AI in front of 80,000 colleagues across a growing ecosystem of enterprise platforms. This role is about the colleague experience with the AI that Pfizer’s own workforce relies on to do their jobs. The role is accountable for ensuring those experiences feel coherent, trustworthy, intuitive and distinctly Pfizer across every platform and every modality. This role is designed for for a highly experienced design leader who has evolved beyond conventional product design practices and operates at the intersection of design, AI, and engineering. A builder who prototypes in code, experiments with emerging AI capabilities, and helps define new interaction paradigms rather than applying established design frameworks. To enable this scale, this role owns Pfizer’s AI-first design system: the patterns, standards, behavioral frameworks that drive consistency across human and agent experiences. Defining 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. This role 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 will also build the team that makes this real. We are looking for someone who brings exceptional executive presence, narrative storytelling ability, and political acumen, while remaining deeply hands-on and invested in hiring talent and 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

• 10–15+ 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
• Occasional travel may be required for workshops, team meetings, or stakeholder engagement
• Flexibility to work across global time zones as needed

Nice To Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• AI Design System Ownership: Own, extend, and evolve Pfizer’s AI-first design system for the colleague experience across human and agent surfaces: the single source of truth for how Pfizer’s AI looks, sounds, and behaves.
• Design Standards as Code: 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.
• Adoption Tracking & Standards Drift: Track adoption in code (pattern usage, override rate, exception requests) and retire patterns the data shows are not working.
• Experience Metrics: Connect design outcomes to measurable KPIs: adoption, task success, trust, time-to-resolution, and first-pass compliance.
• Lead by Example & Innovation: Set the design bar: continuously explore emerging AI capabilities, build functional prototypes in code, introduce emerging tools and methods, validate and scale new ways AI can improve the colleague experience.
• Hands-On Design Delivery: Independently own end-to-end design execution for high-impact, ambiguous initiatives, from problem framing through high-fidelity, interactive, and executive-ready prototypes.
• Agentic & Conversational Design Authority: 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.
• Assistant Behavior Design: Define assistant behaviors such as tone and voice, refusal patterns, transparency cues, and explainability, designing edge cases and failure modes in regulated contexts.
• LLM Product Partnership: Partner closely with AI, Data, Product, and Engineering teams to co-own LLM-enabled products that balance autonomy, usability, safety, and trust.
• Craft Excellence: Maintain an exceptional design bar across interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, product thinking, and storytelling.
• Executive Design Advisory: 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.
• Product Vision & Roadmap: 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.
• Team Building & Talent Lifecycle: Build, lead, and grow a high-performing team of AI-native experience designers: set the hiring bar, define roles, levels and growth paths, and the full talent lifecycle, establish the team’s AI-native ways of working, and mentor direct reports by modeling the craft in their own work.
• Budget & Resourcing: Own the team’s operating budget and staffing across platforms and initiatives; partner with Finance on annual planning.

Benefits

• 401(k) plan with Pfizer Matching Contributions
• additional Pfizer Retirement Savings Contribution
• paid vacation
• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed