Senior Director, Design

TELUS Digital•Charlottesville, VA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

This is a rare seat at the table: a Senior Director, Design role where your impact is felt across clients, craft, and company, not just one team or one account. You'll shape the design strategy for a portfolio of Fortune 500 relationships, lead a talented organization across Design, Creative Services, and Content Design globally to define what world-class digital product design looks like at TELUS Digital. This isn't a role where you're executing someone else's vision. You'll set the direction for how we work, how we grow, and how design earns its place in the most consequential conversations our clients are having.

Requirements

10+ years in design leadership, with significant experience in a client-facing environment such as an agency, consultancy, or embedded within complex enterprise engagements.
A clear track record of leading design teams that produce best-in-class digital products. Work that sets the bar, wins recognition, and consistently raises the standard for what's possible in the space.
Proven experience managing and developing senior designers and design leaders, including performance management and career growth.
Fluency in the full product development lifecycle from strategy and concepting through engineering handoff and launch across multi-disciplinary teams.
The executive presence to present to C-suite stakeholders and the coaching ability to develop that same skill in others.
A track record of building trust with clients over time, not just delivering projects.
Experience managing the business side of design engagements: scope, margin, resourcing, and stakeholder alignment.
Commitment to building inclusive teams with demonstrated experience mentoring designers from underrepresented backgrounds.
Comfortable leading distributed teams and navigating the realities of remote-first collaboration.

Responsibilities

Develop and champion a forward-looking vision for design at TELUS Digital, one that anticipates how AI, emerging tools, and shifting user expectations will reshape what designers do and how they do it.
Define the future competencies of our design organization: the skills, mindsets, and ways of working that will keep our teams and clients ahead of the curve.
Translate that vision into tangible practice: how we hire, how we develop talent, how we evaluate quality, and how we talk about design's value in the market.
Stay genuinely curious and connected to the broader design and technology landscape, bringing outside perspectives in and helping the team make sense of rapid change.
Own design outcomes across a portfolio of Fortune 500 accounts, from executive relationships and QBRs to the quality of what ships.
Serve as a trusted design authority at the C-suite level, influencing client strategy and product direction, not just delivery.
Partner with strategic consultants and business development teams to shape how design is positioned and sold in new and existing engagements.
Drive alignment in complex, high-stakes situations, bringing teams back on track and bringing clients along with clarity and confidence.
Lead, mentor, and grow a team of over 100 designers, content designers, creative services consultants, and design leaders, creating the conditions for exceptional work and meaningful careers.
Recruit actively and elevate TELUS Digital's presence in the design community through thought leadership, networking, and external visibility.
Build a studio culture that balances craft ambition with practical delivery, where feedback is honest, standards are high, and people want to do their best work.
Deliver on revenue targets within your portfolio while identifying opportunities to deepen and expand client relationships.
Bring a sharp commercial lens to resourcing, investment decisions, and account health, not just design quality.
Contribute to the infrastructure of the practice: hiring, playbooks, training, and capability-building initiatives.