Senior Product Design Leader — AI-Driven Platform

Contentful; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Training opportunities

Global collaboration

Quarterly Berlin workshops

Job summary

Contentful is seeking a Senior Manager, Product Design to lead and grow a world‑class team across content performance, platform capabilities, and design systems. You will partner with product and engineering leadership to shape strategy, drive vision, and elevate craft at scale.

You will mentor designers, advance a customer-centered design approach, and champion design system initiatives, including Forma 36.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of product design experience, including 3+ years directly managing and developing product designers, ideally at a B2B SaaS or platform company.
• Strong track record of partnering with product and engineering leadership at the strategy level, not just translating requirements.
• You will influence roadmap decisions, represent design's perspective in cross-functional planning, and drive visioning initiatives.
• A strong customer-centric orientation. You ground design and product decisions in real customer insights and instill that same instinct across your team.
• A track record of design leadership that extends beyond your own team. Experience shaping and evolving the product design function's practices within an organization.
• Maintain a high bar for design craft, with a portfolio reflecting strong interaction and visual design fundamentals.
• You set and uphold that same bar across your team by giving specific, actionable feedback that sharpens execution, not just strategy.
• A track record of leading design for complex, multi-team product areas. You should influence a coherent vision that translates across teams supporting a unified platform.
• Experience owning or contributing to a design system at scale; familiarity with design systems like Forma 36.
• Demonstrated success managing distributed, global teams.
• A genuine interest in AI-native product design, including shipping AI-powered customer-facing features, as well as evolving design tooling and workflows.
• Strong portfolio evidence of coaching designers' career growth.
• Comfort operating in a technically complex, enterprise/platform context. The interfaces and user flows we design operate within a headless, API first context and a mindset of 'systems thinking' is paramount.

Responsibilities

• Lead and coach a team of product designers across multiple product areas including content performance optimization, platform capabilities, business foundations and design systems.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership on strategy and shape the platform's evolution.
• Influence roadmap decisions and drive visioning across Optimization, Application Foundations and Business Foundations.
• Own or contribute to the design system at scale, including Forma 36, and evolve tooling and workflows for AI-native features.
• Collaborate with global colleagues and manage distributed teams while maintaining craft excellence and career growth for your designers.

Skills

Product design leadership

Team management

Strategy & roadmap influence

User-centered design

Design systems

AI-native design

Craft excellence

Cross-functional collaboration

Global/distributed teams

Portfolio-driven feedback

Tools

Forma 36

Job description

Contentful is seeking a Senior Manager, Product Design to lead and grow a world‑class team across content performance, platform capabilities, and design systems. You will partner with product and engineering leadership to shape strategy, drive vision, and elevate craft at scale.

You will mentor designers, advance a customer-centered design approach, and champion design system initiatives, including Forma 36.