Sr. Director, User Experience

Alteryx•Irvine, CA

5d•$253,000 - $279,000•Remote

About The Position

This is a senior leadership role inside Alteryx's Experience & Insights organization, which also includes Customer Signals, Experience Foundations, and Content. The Senior Director of User Experience will directly manage the leaders of four product design teams — roughly 30 designers in total, spread across the globe — and will partner closely with cross-functional peers so design decisions are grounded in strategy, built on shared foundations, and delivered with real operational rigor. The opportunity is to scale and elevate the work of the product design teams today while setting the vision for our future design state. We believe strong design leadership rests on three things: the ability to shape design and product strategy (increasingly, AI-powered and agentic product strategy), the discipline to run design as a scalable, measurable operation, and the people leadership skill to grow and unlock a talented global team. This role calls for real depth in all three.

Requirements

15+ years in product design, including 6+ years leading design managers or leads (not just individual designers) in a SaaS or enterprise software environment.
A track record of leading multiple design teams at once across a broad product portfolio; experience with complex, technical, or data-heavy products is a strong plus.
Genuine enthusiasm and point of view about designing AI-powered and agentic experiences, not just familiarity with the trend.
Demonstrated ability to operate across all levels, from shaping strategy with executives to reviewing craft and providing hands-on design feedback.
Experience building and running design operations at scale: resourcing models, metrics, review cadences, and tooling.
Experience managing distributed, global teams, with the cultural fluency to lead well across every time zone.
Working knowledge of design systems, accessibility, and localization, and the judgment to know when to defer to functional experts versus weigh in directly.
Excellent written and verbal communication, and the ability to influence peers and executives without formal authority over adjacent functions like product management, engineering, and research.
A genuinely collaborative approach: this role sits inside a broader ecosystem and succeeds only in close partnership with peer leaders across the product, experience & insights, and engineering organizations.

Nice To Haves

experience with complex, technical, or data-heavy products is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Evolve the design vision and strategy for Alteryx's product portfolio, with particular focus on shaping how AI-powered and agentic experiences show up for customers, ensuring they feel trustworthy, explainable, and genuinely useful, not just automated.
Represent design in senior leadership forums, advocating for user-centered outcomes and defending design quality under commercial pressure.
Partner with product management, engineering, and executive leadership to shape roadmaps, influence prioritization, and represent the user's perspective in major product decisions.
Translate customer signals — research, telemetry, Voice of Customer, and preview program findings — into design direction, working closely with the leaders who own those disciplines.
Build and run the operating model for a 30-person, globally distributed design organization: staffing, capacity planning, prioritization frameworks, and design-ops processes that scale across four teams and multiple product lines.
Set clear, repeatable processes and expectations for design discovery, design review, and handoff to engineering, so quality and rigor don't depend on any one person being in the room.
Establish design metrics and quality bars to demonstrate the team's impact and identify where to improve.
Champion the integration of AI across the design practice to streamline repeatable work and create space for the team to experiment with new approaches and focus deeply on solving complex problems.
Own budget, tooling, and contractor/vendor relationships supporting the design organization.
Directly manage the four design leaders running each product design team, coaching them to grow their own people and raise the bar for their teams.
Continue building a culture of rigorous, kind critique and high craft standards across a strong, globally distributed team, protecting what works while pushing it further.
Champion career paths, leveling, and growth plans for designers at every level, and be a visible advocate for design careers inside Alteryx.
Help the team blaze trails with AI, building their fluency and confidence designing agentic, AI-powered experiences, and modeling curiosity rather than caution.