Director of User Experience

Second Nature

1d•$170,000 - $180,000•Remote

About The Position

Second Nature is seeking a Director of User Experience to lead content and user experience efforts. This role reports to the VP of Product and manages a team of 4-6 designers across product domains and strategic initiatives. The position operates within a "Product Trio" model, embedding the design team into the leadership structure of product teams. The Director will also partner with Customer Success, Implementation, and Data leaders. This is a strategic player-coach position, with approximately 80% focused on leadership and team development, and 20% on hands-on strategic design direction. The hands-on contribution will involve high-level framing, experience architecture, and driving design sprints for ambiguous, high-stakes new product surfaces. The company is passionate about turning friction into triple win experiences for residents, property managers, and investors, making renting easy and rewarding for everyone. Second Nature has built the world's first Resident Experience Platform and is looking for a design leader who can maintain a high bar of design quality while leveraging AI in product development.

Requirements

8+ years in digital product UX.
3+ years managing designers directly.
Current craft: ability to show recent, self-made design work.
Evidence of growing people: ability to name and describe how an individual was developed.
Expertise in design systems at the architectural level, including token and pattern composition, distributed contribution models, and managing drift without becoming a bottleneck.
Ability to assess UX or content work and identify strengths, derivative elements, and corresponding levels.
Proficiency in measurement: defining metrics before work begins, instrumenting them, and adjusting course based on performance.
Executive communication skills: ability to present UX strategy, tradeoffs, and outcomes to executive teams, explaining the impact of design decisions on business metrics and the Triple Win.
Research leadership: ability to build a practice with a repeatable cadence of user engagement, pre-launch usability testing, and use of behavioral data for decision-making.
A clear position on AI and design, covering both product surfaces and team practices.
Hands-on experience with AI tooling for prototyping, content creation, research synthesis, or design-system compliance.
Openness to compromise and ability to manage biases.
Fluency in both consumer (resident) and operator (property manager) design registers.
Must be available during scheduled working hours and give full attention to job duties.
Must have a quiet, professional, distraction-free work environment.
Must have access to a reliable high-speed internet connection.

Nice To Haves

Attend bi-annual in-person company meetings (Second Nature will reimburse business travel costs per company guidelines).

Responsibilities

Define the Experience Vision: A cohesive UX strategy and North Star for the Resident Experience Platform, aligned with company and product strategy.
Foster Design Culture: Implement critique that improves work, encourage cross-functional collaboration, and promote knowledge sharing. Raise the UX bar across the company through coaching, workshops, and design share-outs.
Manage Team Growth & Development: Oversee hiring, create growth plans, manage leveling and compensation conversations, and provide timely feedback.
Develop a Design Portfolio: Lead strategic projects from conception to completion.
Oversee the Design System: Manage tokens, patterns, accessibility standards, governance, and track adoption rates.
Lead the Research Practice: Determine who to talk to for maximum leverage, establish research cadence, and ensure evidence informs decisions, including contradictory findings.
Guide Content Design: Support the practice alongside interaction and visual design.
Establish the AI UX/Content Operating Model: Define tooling, risk tiering, guardrails, and create demonstrable examples of outcome achievement.