Director, Product Design

Invoca•Remote - California, Bay Area, CA

14h•$225,000 - $255,000•Remote

About The Position

Invoca is seeking a Director of Product Design to lead the craft, quality bar, and creative direction of the Invoca platform. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who is happiest designing the hardest, highest-leverage parts of the product and developing a team of designers who consistently ship work they're proud of. This is a player/coach role, and we mean that without qualification. You will personally own and ship design for our most complex and strategically important platform initiatives. You will also manage, coach, and grow a team of strong product designers. You'll do both in the same week, sometimes the same day. We're not looking for someone to manage a design org from a distance. We're looking for someone who ships. You'll set the standard for what "great" looks like at Invoca, ensure every workstream rolls up into a cohesive, modern platform UX, and bring the AI-first design practices that let our team move at the speed of AI-assisted engineering. You won't be a step in a product manager's process, you'll be a peer to product and engineering leadership, generating ideas and opportunities that shape where the product goes next. You'll inherit a talented team. Your first mandate is to raise their ceiling and sharpen the quality bar across every surface of the product, which right now means helping designers find new leverage as engineering velocity changes, creating the psychological safety to experiment without fear, and modeling what it looks like to evolve craft rather than defend it. You'll also build design fluency across the broader R&D org so good design decisions happen everywhere, not just on your team. If you're energized by personally designing the hardest problems, developing designers who consistently ship work they're proud of, and using this AI moment to fundamentally change how design teams operate and integrate with engineering, this is the role for you.

Requirements

10+ years of product design experience, with 4+ years leading and managing other product designers in a B2B SaaS or enterprise software environment. You can point to recent work you personally designed and designers you've grown: not one or the other.
A portfolio that demonstrates exceptional craft across visual design, interaction design, and systems thinking, with clear examples of complex platform work, not just marketing sites or consumer one-offs. Your portfolio shows both the strategic scope and the pixel-level execution.
Deep, hands-on experience designing for AI-powered products: agentic experiences, conversational interfaces, generative UI, and human-in-the-loop workflows. You have an active, evolving practice with modern AI design and prototyping tools and a clear point of view on how design teams should operate now that engineering velocity has fundamentally changed.
A hands-on practice of generative and evaluative research: customer interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, scrappy validation. You don't outsource discovery; you've built the instincts that come from sitting with users yourself. You've also figured out how to use AI to accelerate synthesis and pattern-finding across qualitative data, and you have a point of view on where it helps and where it doesn't.
Genuine comfort operating at the boundary of design and front-end development: whether that's designing in code, working alongside engineers in the codebase, or building a model for how design handoff works in a world with UX engineers and AI-assisted implementation. You've thought about this and have opinions.
Demonstrated experience shaping product strategy and direction, not just executing on it. Examples where your design thinking changed what the company decided to build. You come with ideas, not just responses.
Experience designing for complex enterprise platforms with multiple personas and deep configurability. You understand the difference between designing for consumer delight and designing for enterprise utility, and you can hold both.
Able to articulate design rationale clearly to executives, engineers, and customers. You give direct feedback with care, receive it with curiosity, and can say the hard thing in the room when it needs to be said.

Nice To Haves

Background in conversation intelligence, CCaaS, MarTech, AdTech, or analytics platforms
Experience evolving or building a design system that scales across a multi-product platform
Public point of view on the future of design in the AI era: writing, speaking, or community involvement

Responsibilities

Personally own the design of our most strategic, complex, and foundational platform experiences: the work that sets the tone for everything else
Lead user research and discovery on the hardest, most ambiguous platform problems: get in front of customers, synthesize what they're actually trying to do, and translate insight into product opportunity. The proactive ideas you bring to product leadership come from this work, not from a deck.
Drive the end-to-end design process on those initiatives: discovery, exploration, prototyping, validation, and ship-quality execution
Bring proactive ideas, opportunities, and prototypes to product and engineering leadership that influence roadmap direction; not just react to Product Briefs
Establish and evolve the design language, interaction patterns, and AI-native paradigms that define how Invoca looks, feels, and works
Operate at the boundary of design and front-end development: designing in code where it's faster, partnering directly with engineers on implementation, and closing the gap between design intent and shipped product
Manage, coach, and grow a team of product designers: give direct feedback, develop people into stronger designers, and build a design culture where the work gets better every cycle
Set and uphold the quality bar across every surface of the platform; review work consistently, and don't let inconsistent or middling design ship
Own platform-level UX cohesion: ensure individual designers' workstreams add up to one coherent product, not a federation of features
Partner with PMs and tech leads to build design fluency across the broader product org. Not every design decision will run through your team, and you'll help ensure the people making those decisions are equipped to make them well
Define how the design org operates: rituals, critique culture, design ops, tooling and the integration of AI-assisted workflows that keep the team's velocity matched to the pace of AI-accelerated engineering
Extend that operating model beyond the design team: give PMs, tech leads, and engineers the patterns, components, guardrails, and feedback loops they need to make strong design decisions on the work that doesn't run through your team
Partner closely with Product Management & Engineering leadership as a peer voice in shaping strategy, prioritization, and roadmap
Bring an AI-first operating model to everything the design team does: how ideas are explored, how prototypes are built, how handoffs happen, and how the gap between design and front-end engineering gets closed. You'll have a clear, evolving point of view on which AI design and prototyping tools your team should adopt, and you'll lead by doing, not by delegating.