Senior Director, Product Design

Pearl • San Francisco, CA

6h • Remote

About The Position

Pearl is transforming professional services through AI + human expertise. As AI reshapes how products are imagined, built, and delivered, Design must evolve from crafting screens to orchestrating intelligent experiences.

We are seeking a Senior Director, Product Design to transform Design for the AI age, elevating taste, redefining the role of designers, and building a practice that combines human judgment with AI leverage to create world-class experiences at unprecedented speed.
This leader will define what remains human, what becomes AI-accelerated, and how Pearl delivers intelligent, trustworthy, and emotionally resonant experiences at scale.

Requirements

• 10+ years in product design, experience design, or related leadership roles
• Proven leadership of multidisciplinary design teams at scale
• Track record elevating design quality and organizational design maturity
• Experience building or evolving design systems used across complex products
• Deep partnership with Product and Engineering to deliver customer-facing experiences
• Demonstrated integration of AI into design workflows, prototyping, or product development to improve velocity, insight, or consistency
• Strong judgment in distinguishing where human craft is essential and where AI can accelerate quality and speed

Nice To Haves

• Experience in marketplace, SaaS, platform, or two-sided ecosystem environments
• Experience building rapid prototyping and discovery practices
• Experience scaling design through systems, automation, or tooling

Responsibilities

• Transform design into an AI-native practice: define where human judgment matters most and where AI can accelerate workflows from discovery to delivery.
• Set the bar for taste and trust: establish a design standard that ensures experiences feel coherent, credible, and distinctly human as we scale with AI.
• Build an AI-enabled design system: evolve our system into reusable components + patterns + prompts that scale quality and enable safe creation beyond the design team.
• Lead and grow a high-impact team (~20+): coach, develop, and raise the team’s AI fluency while preserving what already makes Pearl design great.
• Ground design in real human insight: deepen customer and expert research, leverage AI to surface behavioral patterns and intent, and ensure experiences reflect how people actually think, decide, and act.
• Drive experience strategy upstream: strengthen research and system-level experience thinking, and partner across Product, Eng, Content, and ML to deliver outcomes, not just interfaces.

What This Job Offers

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