Director of UX & Design

Overview

Our client is seeking a strategic and experienced Director of UX & Design to lead an enterprise UX function supporting multiple business verticals, including law, tax, and government. This senior leadership opportunity is ideal for a design executive who can bring structure, vision, and momentum to a talented and varied UX organization.

The successful candidate will shape the future direction of the UX function, establish shared design standards, strengthen collaboration across product and engineering, and ensure consistent prioritization across complex product lines and competing stakeholder needs. This role combines people leadership, enterprise-level prioritization, executive engagement, design quality oversight, and UX thought leadership.

The Director will guide a team of capable designers, supporting mentoring, career development, performance management, recruiting, and team growth. The role requires a trusted, diplomatic leader who can operate effectively in a matrixed environment, advocate for the UX organization, and make fair, thoughtful decisions when priorities and resources are contested.

Required Skills

• Significant experience leading and managing UX, product design, or enterprise design teams.
• Proven ability to mentor designers, support career development, manage performance, recruit talent, and develop emerging leaders.
• Enterprise-level experience working across multiple business units, product lines, or industry verticals.
• Strong executive presence and experience presenting to senior executives.
• Demonstrated ability to negotiate priorities, manage expectations, resolve conflict, and build alignment among stakeholders.
• Strong UX and design judgment, including the ability to assess design quality, visual language, product direction, and overall user experience.
• Credible expertise in UX and product design, even without producing designs on a day-to-day basis.
• Ability to evaluate experiences across user journeys, product architecture, workflows, context, and jobs to be done—not only visual presentation or surface-level UI.
• Experience establishing a common visual and product language across multiple products, platforms, or user experiences.
• Current familiarity with UX in an AI-driven product environment, including awareness of AI, agentic design, spec-driven design, and evolving design tools and practices.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with product management, engineering, research, and business leadership.
• Comfort operating in a matrixed, service-oriented organization with competing delivery expectations and diverse stakeholder needs.

Nice to Have Skills

• Experience leading UX for complex professional, enterprise, healthcare workflow, financial-services, banking, or similarly specialized products.
• Experience working across meaningful, end-to-end user workflows rather than within a highly siloed design function.
• Experience with external thought leadership, industry events, or presentations to CEO-level audiences.
• Familiarity with modern design tools and practices that enable designers to contribute beyond traditional design responsibilities.
• Experience supporting teams that include guild, union, or similarly represented individual contributors.
• Experience overseeing UX teams that participate in user research execution while partnering with a separate research leadership function.