Director, UX & Product Design

HireRight•Nashville, TN

About The Position

HireRight is redefining its design function, and we’re looking for a Director, UX & Product Design to join us on this journey. We are looking for a player-coach that’s senior enough to raise the bar and hands-on enough to demonstrate the value firsthand. The core of this job is evangelizing design thinking globally, starting with the Product and Engineering org and expanding to other departments as influence grows. This includes building the reusable systems that let anyone at HireRight produce good experiences: component libraries, research practices, content and copy standards, AI-assisted design workflows, and the decision frameworks that turn process into impact. This means orchestrating the creation of artifacts for designers, product managers, engineers, and even cross-functional partners that contribute to the customer or candidate experience. If you have ever been the person who fixed the system instead of the ticket, this is that job.

Requirements

Senior leadership experience. Substantial experience as a senior design leader, including work that scaled beyond the products you personally designed.
Systems thinking. You can point to patterns, components, or practices you created that other people adopted and are still using today. You naturally orient towards themes and systems over bespoke solutions.
Given a wide field of opportunity, you comfortably sift through ambiguity and noise to decide what matters most now, what waits and why, and you can make that case to the people it affects.
Player-coach range. You are comfortable with your directs and peers and comfortable in front of a leadership team, and you know which one the moment calls for.
Strong current Figma skills. We use Figma today; we want your influence on what we use tomorrow, so we are looking for someone fluent in the tool but not married to it.
AI fluency. Practical experience with AI tools in a design workflow plus judgment about where they help and where they quietly degrade quality.
Accessibility depth. Real WCAG 2.1 AA fluency and beyond, applied to shipped products rather than audited after the fact.
Influence without authority. Across Product, Engineering, Compliance, Sales, and Operations, translating design decisions into the language each of those functions use.
Bias towards action. You know when to plan and when to just do. You get things done.

Nice To Haves

You have built and implemented a design system or component library from zero inside an organization or team that did not have one.
You have created AI design templates, prompt libraries, and Claude skills that others use in production work and can speak to the business and customer impact.
Experience adapting systems across varied platforms and stacks: you have opinions, but they travel.
Background in regulated, high-trust, or compliance-heavy domains (HR tech, background screening, financial services, healthcare) where clarity and comprehension carry legal weight.
Experience designing for multiple audiences with different incentives (in our case, candidates, the employers screening them, and internal team members driving the work).
Enterprise B2B experience, including complex workflows and configuration-heavy products.

Responsibilities

Build and govern HireRight’s design system with Branding (components, patterns, tokens, content standards, etc.) including the intake, review, rollout, and deprecation processes that keep it useful, not burdensome.
Align with Engineering’s front-end platform.
Create AI-assisted workflows and templates (copy, accessibility checks, research synthesis, pattern generation) that non-designers can use safely, and drive adoption by making them genuinely useful rather than mandatory.
Own the toolchain: audit what we license today and go-forward across design, prototyping, research, analytics, and accessibility, and assess what is actually used, duplicated, or wasted.
Run selection and renewal with Procurement, InfoSec, and Finance, and propose a forward-looking roadmap where AI-native tools earn a place, what we pilot before we buy, and what we retire.
Set and hold a high bar across interaction, visual, content, and accessibility.
Coach designers, PMs, and engineers on craft and responsible design; give specific, actionable critique and teach others to give it.
Install lightweight quality controls that hold without policing: critique rhythms, definition of done, accessibility checklists, and release validation.
Establish research standards, templates, and learning loops with Product and Data so discovery is repeatable rather than heroic. Ensure learnings get shared and applied rather than forgotten.
Raise the floor on problem framing: journey maps, principles, and artifacts that keep teams solving the right problem at the right scope.
Define UX health in a few measures the team, stakeholders, and customers understand and instrument for them during design rather than after launch.
Make user testing and evaluation routine: a standing participant pipeline, lightweight testing templates, post-launch review, and a scorecard others can run without you.
Define a shared experience vision across the candidate and employer journeys and the mechanisms (reviews, principles, guardrails) that keep teams from fragmenting it.
Build regulated-experience guardrails with Legal, Compliance, and Risk: disclosure patterns, consent and authorization flows, adverse action communication, and easy-to-understand copy.
Communicate design decisions in ways that move Executives, Sales, and Engineering, and create the repeatable formats that let others do the same.