Product Design Director, Food & Beverage

Block • San Francisco Bay Area, CA

13d

About The Position

Since we opened our doors in 2009, the world of commerce has evolved immensely, and so has Square. After enabling anyone to take payments and never miss a sale, we saw sellers stymied by disparate, outmoded products and tools that wouldn’t work together. So we expanded into software and started building integrated, omnichannel solutions – to help sellers sell online, manage inventory, offer buy now, pay later functionality, book appointments, engage loyal buyers, and hire and pay staff. Across it all, we’ve embedded financial services tools at the point of sale, so merchants can access a business loan and manage their cash flow in one place. Afterpay furthers our goal to provide omnichannel tools that unlock meaningful value and growth, enabling sellers to capture the next generation shopper, increase order sizes, and compete at a larger scale. Today, we are a partner to sellers of all sizes – large, enterprise-scale businesses with complex operations, sellers just starting, as well as merchants who began selling with Square and have grown larger over time. As our sellers grow, so do our solutions. There is a massive opportunity in front of us. We’re building a significant, meaningful, and lasting business, and we are helping sellers worldwide do the same. The Role The restaurant industry has transformed dramatically in recent years. Owners, operators, and staff have had to rethink how they run service, manage complex operations, and stay competitive in an environment that's constantly shifting. Square's Food & Beverage team builds the tools that help them adapt and thrive — connecting ordering, production, and operational workflows across Front and Back of House. We're looking for a Design Director to lead the next chapter of Front of House and Back of House product design at Square. You'll shape one of our most operationally complex and strategically important product areas, defining how restaurant teams take orders, communicate, prepare food, and keep service running smoothly across the POS, Kiosk, Kitchen Display Systems, Printers and more. You'll set the vision for how thoughtful design, systems thinking, and deep workflow empathy create durable competitive advantages for restaurants. This role reports to the Head of Design for Food & Beverage and is a key leader within the FOH/BOH organization, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Research. You'll lead a team of Product Designers focused on bringing clarity, coherence, and high-quality execution to the heart of restaurant operations.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in design management both leading and building product design teams.
• Demonstrated impact on product strategy and user experience in previous roles.
• A record of delivering transformative, high-impact work.
• Outstanding UX capabilities and strong visual design competency, including visual, UI/UX, and systems-design.
• A passion for an iterative process. You think fast on your feet, come up with solutions to important situations, are swift to make decisions and take calculated risks. Proactively seeking out opportunities to improve, always searching for new knowledge and ideas. You experiment, learn from failure, and iterate.
• Experience managing a team of 4+ direct reports.

Nice To Haves

• Ideally, firsthand experience in hospitality/operating a restaurant and/or a passion for the restaurant industry.

Responsibilities

• Set the vision and raise the bar. Define the vision for the future of hospitality, ensuring every FOH and BOH workflow—from order-taking to kitchen operations.
• Obsess over the details to make sure the experience in service is fast, intuitive, and delightfully simple to use.
• Scale impact through systems and practices. Build frameworks, patterns, and design rituals that enable your team to move quickly without sacrificing quality, promoting cohesion across surfaces and teams across Block.
• Champion user-centric thinking. Keep restaurant owners and staff—across FOH and BOH—at the center of every decision and our future vision, balancing business needs, deep empathy and understanding, and world-class design execution.
• Create clarity in ambiguous, interconnected spaces. Use systems thinking to frame problems, set strategic focus, and guide your team toward aligned, meaningful progress. Get hands-on with the work when necessary to help remove obstacles.
• Lead with trust and clarity. Build the conditions for exceptional work by mentoring a high-performing team of product designers, fostering psychological safety, inspiring ambition, and modeling systems thinking to achieve outstanding results.
• Shape the future of intelligent workflows. Integrate automation and AI to streamline restaurant operations and workflows that

What This Job Offers

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