Senior Director, Design
About The Position
The Senior Director, Design owns the design infrastructure that supports Rent the Runway’s platform, including the systems, experiences, and visual language that shape how customers discover and engage with its offerings. The role leads the in-house design function and is accountable for design quality, coherence, and performance across the customer-facing platform. Design is part of the Product & Channel Revenue organization and works alongside Product, Engineering, Copy, and Creative. In partnership with Brand Creative, the role ensures brand identity is implemented consistently across the site, app, email, and other product surfaces. The Senior Director, Design will also help advance RTR’s customer-led fashion service platform across subscription, Reserve, and resale, including AI-enabled customer experiences.
Requirements
- 10+ years of design experience.
- Demonstrated leadership of multidisciplinary design teams.
- Experience building or significantly evolving a design system in a consumer-facing product environment, with an understanding of how systems scale across teams and surfaces.
- Strong product design instincts and meaningful experience with complex user journeys, checkout flows, personalization experiences, and discovery surfaces.
- Understanding of how AI is changing product design and a point of view on integrating AI-powered features into a coherent, trustworthy user experience.
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills, including working with product managers, engineers, and brand leaders and translating design decisions into business impact.
- Experience building and scaling design organizations, developing direct reports, establishing team structures, and creating career frameworks and operating rhythms.
- Ability to bring clarity and structure to ambiguous situations, define design problems, align stakeholders, and lead execution.
- Ability to work in a high-stakes, fast-moving environment and protect quality while moving quickly.
Nice To Haves
- Experience in fashion, retail, or a direct-to-consumer platform.
Responsibilities
- Own RTR’s design systems and visual language implementation across the site, app, email, and internal tools, coordinating closely with Brand Creative.
- Lead the end-to-end UX and product design function across the customer-facing platform, incorporating AI tools into team workflows to improve efficiency and output while maintaining quality.
- Drive the product design track for AI-enabled initiatives, including AI-powered discovery, fit recommendations, and PDP design.
- Build and develop a high-performing, multidisciplinary product design team.
- Establish and maintain design quality standards and review processes for RTR’s digital platform, and uphold those standards across the team and with external partners.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, and Channel Revenue in roadmap planning, sprint reviews, and product decisions where design has a meaningful stake.
- Collaborate with Brand Creative to translate brand-level design direction into accurate, scalable platform implementation across digital surfaces.
- Manage design vendors, tools, and operational infrastructure.
- Represent design’s strategic perspective to leadership, explain the business impact of design decisions, and advocate for the resources and support the team needs.
Benefits
- Paid time off, including vacation, paid bereavement, and family sick leave.
- Comprehensive health, vision, and dental coverage, plus FSA and dependent care benefits, from the first day of employment.
- 401(k) match.
- Employee subscription and rental discounts.
- Universal paid parental leave for both parents and a flexible return-to-work program.
- Paid sabbatical after five years of continuous service.
- Company-wide events and outings.
- Office-centric work, with corporate employees and technical leaders able to work remotely on Fridays in accordance with company policies.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
