Director of Product Design

Realtor.com Careers•Austin, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Realtor.com® is the No. 1 site trusted by real estate professionals, with over 25 years of experience connecting buyers, sellers, and renters with trusted insights and expert guidance. Avail, part of Realtor.com®, is a fast-growing platform transforming the rental experience for independent landlords and tenants. This role is for a design systems expert looking to create world-class experiences. The position partners closely with senior leaders in Product and Engineering to execute a vision for transforming the real estate industry. Responsibilities include design decisions and patterns for multiple products, ensuring adoption by product designers, enhancing the design system, promoting education, and collaborating across platforms. A team of designers will report to this role, and close partnership with an engineering team is expected. Collaboration with cross-functional leaders on team capacity and skills, and with other design leaders on Design Ops tools and processes, is also key. This role reports to the Head of Avail.

Requirements

10+ years of experience working in the design industry
3+ years of working in a product-led organization
5+ years of providing design direction and mentoring to colleagues in a leadership role
5+ years leading a design systems and product design team
Proven implementation track record: Deep, hands-on experience deploying and maintaining systems inside active engineering codebases and production environments.
A "doing" mindset: Portfolio proving comfort designing individual design tokens and complex components, as well as managing a team roadmap.
Practical AI experience: Familiarity with leveraging AI design tools, LLMs, or automation workflows.
Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
A strong visual aesthetic and design point of view
Experience delivering multiple projects simultaneously with cross-disciplined teams
Experience with capacity planning and workload management
Knowledge of Figma, JIRA, and project management tools
Informed and strong opinions, loosely held
A practitioner of user-centric processes and design thinking principles
Exemplifies a "We, Not Me" attitude

Responsibilities

Own the Avail design system, defining and evolving components, patterns, and tokens, and driving their adoption.
Set the quality standard for end-to-end product design across Avail, reviewing and guiding feature work for cohesion.
Build accessible patterns and tokens into the system and grow the team's fluency in accessibility.
Partner with engineering to align components across design and code, and advance a connected toolchain between Figma and the codebase.
Maintain clear, accessible documentation and contribution processes for every component.
Translate the value of design systems and accessibility into business and quality metrics for stakeholders.
Sequence systems and accessibility work into a prioritized roadmap aligned with engineering and product timelines.
Partner with Brand and Marketing on consistency across external-facing assets and maintain icon and illustration libraries.
Mentor and manage a team of product designers, supporting their craft and career development.
Partner with wider RDC design leadership on capacity, tooling, and process, keeping workflows healthy in Jira and Confluence.
Balance strategic leadership and team management with hands-on design, building, and shipping components.
Own the hands-on execution of moving designs from Figma into production code.
Explore, pilot, and implement AI-assisted design tooling and workflows.