Senior Director, Product Design - Auto Design
About The Position
Capital One is seeking a Senior Director of Top of House Design for its Auto Design organization within Experience Design. The team acts as a strategic catalyst across Auto Design, connecting platform architecture with unified, human-centered experiences. It works horizontally across high-impact product areas to align strategy, scale operational frameworks, and improve end-to-end customer visibility, with an emphasis on scalability, security, and design excellence. The role leads a cross-disciplinary team of design leaders and designers and works closely with Design, Product, Technology, and business leadership. The Senior Director identifies high-leverage opportunities with executive stakeholders and leads complex, high-impact design initiatives that advance experience excellence and business outcomes. The role also sets strategic direction for the team, develops design leaders and designers, supports innovation that can scale across Auto Design, and collaborates with peer design leaders to improve shared experiences and services. The ideal candidate has a strong portfolio demonstrating leadership, process, results, and impact. This is a hybrid position, subject to Capital One’s on-site presence policy for the designated office location.
Requirements
- At least 10 years of experience leading product design teams and delivering products to market.
- At least 3 years of experience managing managers.
- Strong portfolio demonstrating leadership, process, results, and impact.
- Established expertise and leadership in product design, including interaction, visual, and service design.
- Ability to build and lead teams, set strategic direction, and develop design leaders and designers.
- Ability to apply human-centered methods and consider diverse customer perspectives throughout the design process.
- Ability to understand products, processes, customers, competitors, and industry trends and apply that knowledge to business challenges.
- Strong problem-solving, systems-thinking, collaboration, and communication skills, including presenting to executive leaders.
- Ability to partner with cross-functional leaders and translate complex capabilities into cohesive experiences.
Nice To Haves
- At least 12 years of experience leading product design teams and delivering products to market.
- Deep expertise building, scaling, and governing enterprise-grade design systems, shared platforms, or developer/designer tool ecosystems across multiple platforms.
- Deep experience leading product design teams across UX and UI, strategy, content, and research from strategy through market delivery.
- Deep experience partnering with product managers, engineers, marketing, and analytics leaders across multiple business lines to shape strategy, performance metrics, roadmaps, and operating models.
- Track record of defining and deploying AI-augmented design workflows, design agents, or generative UI tooling.
- Demonstrated success establishing global standards for visual quality, interaction patterns, code/design parity testing, and contribution models.
- Proficiency with web and mobile technologies and platforms and ability to account for technology considerations and constraints in product and experience decisions.
- Ability to treat design systems as internal SaaS products, make business cases, and measure platform ROI using developer/designer velocity, defect reduction, code reusability, and time-to-market metrics.
- Exceptional interpersonal, relationship-building, people-management, and development skills.
Responsibilities
- Partner with Product, Technology, and business unit leaders to understand financial, technical, and experiential objectives and help drive design, product, and experience outcomes.
- Identify and advocate for high-leverage opportunities with executive stakeholders and lead complex, high-impact design projects.
- Lead, mentor, and develop design leaders and designers; oversee work quality and efficiency and support learning and growth.
- Enable innovation incubation, including practices and processes that can scale across Auto Design.
- Collaborate with peer design leaders across Capital One to coordinate the broader experience ecosystem, find efficiencies in shared technologies and service moments, and create cross-business value.
- Recruit top talent, run a high-performing team, and invest in team members’ continued success.
- Champion human-centered methodologies across the Auto line of business.
- Set the vision and strategic direction for the team in partnership with cross-functional partners.
- Apply product design expertise across interaction, visual, and service design, and help optimize tools, platforms, frameworks, and design systems.
- Use design frameworks, data, and research insights to communicate with executive leaders and stakeholders and influence strategic direction.
Benefits
- Comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive health, financial, and other benefits supporting total well-being.
- Eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
