Director, AI Product Design & Experience

HSBC; Hong Kong; Hybrid; HKD 1,200,000 - 1,900,000; Full time

Job summary

HSBC Holdings plc in Hong Kong and London seeks a Director, AI Product Design & Experience to lead enterprise design strategy for AI-native products. You will define design principles, drive cross‑functional collaboration and ensure experiences are user‑centred, trusted and scalable.

This role focuses on strong governance, design system maturity, and collaboration across product, engineering, brand, data and risk functions to deliver compelling AI-enabled journeys with measurable outcomes.

Qualifications

• Significant design leadership experience at Director level.
• Ability to lead a distributed design organisation across multiple teams and channels.
• Experience creating and scaling enterprise design systems and reusable components.
• Deep knowledge of AI-native interaction design (conversational, multimodal, adaptive).
• Strong governance around accessibility, responsible AI, privacy and risk.

Responsibilities

• Define the design vision and operating model for AI-native products and the wider digital experience agenda.
• Lead enterprise AI tooling strategy and scale reusable design components.
• Oversee design systems governance and integration with engineering pockets.
• Provide senior design direction for priority AI products from framing to post-launch iteration.
• Establish research and measurement practices to improve usability and outcomes.
• Engage with external practitioners and thought leaders to keep HSBC informed.

Skills

Design leadership

AI-native design

Stakeholder management

Design systems

Prototyping with code

Communication

Regulatory & risk

Job description

This role is open in both Hong Kong and London.

Some careers open more doors than others.

If you’re looking for a career that will unlock new opportunities, join HSBC and experience the possibilities. Whether you want a career that could take you to the top, or simply take you in an exciting new direction, HSBC offers opportunities, support and rewards that will take you further.

Our GCIO organisation plays a critical role for the bank. This team partners with our businesses to build the platforms, systems, and products that our customers use every day. This team keeps people’s money and data safe, and is at the forefront of driving innovation for our businesses, customers, and colleagues.

We are currently seeking a high calibre professional to join our team as a Director, AI Product Design & Experience.

Role purpose:

The Director, AI Product Design & Experience will be, first and foremost, an enterprise design leader: setting the design strategy, raising the quality and consistency of design practice, and building the capabilities needed to deliver coherent digital experiences at scale. The role will bring particular expertise in and experience standard for AI-native products, ensuring across HSBC. The role will ensure that experiences shaped, generated or orchestrated through AI are intentionally designed around user intent, trust, usability and measurable outcomes—not treated as conventional interfaces with AI features added.

Reporting to the Group Head of Product, Enterprise AI Tooling & Digital Experience, the role will lead HSBC’s enterprise design agenda for AI-native products and strengthen the wider design system, operating model, talent and governance that underpin consistent customer and colleague experiences. Alongside this broad leadership remit, the Director will serve as a specialist senior authority on emerging AI interaction patterns, translating user expectations and design practice. It will translate external developments in conversational, multimodal, adaptive and agentic experiences into practical principles, reusable patterns and product decisions for HSBC that reflect HSBC’s user, brand, accessibility, regulatory and risk context.

The role requires design-engineering fluency rather than an engineering lead profile: enough technical depth to work credibly with engineers, understand how design systems and AI behaviours are implemented. The Director will also define and drive HSBC’s enterprise-wide AI-ready design tooling strategy, connecting. It will connect machine-readable design components and tokens, a living design knowledge base, AI-assisted research and prototyping, automated design quality checks, and governed design workflows so that teams and AI tools can produce high-quality, consistent and trusted experiences at scale. Working across product, design, engineering, research, brand, data and control functions, the Director will combine hands‑on intervention on priority AI products with building the reusable capabilities that enable teams across the Group to design better experiences independently.

Principal Accountabilities:

• Enterprise design leadership and capability — Define the design vision, priorities and operating model for AI-native products and the wider digital experience agenda; align product, design, engineering and business leaders around a high bar for user outcomes. Raise design quality, consistency and influence across HSBC by strengthening leadership, skills, career development, communities of practice and the conditions for effective multidisciplinary working.
• Design systems, standards and governance — Set the strategy and roadmap for reusable components, design tokens and experience principles across customer and colleague products, embedding accessibility and brand standards. Establish proportionate design reviews and assurance for visual and behavioural changes to create coherent experiences without unnecessary central control.
• Priority product design — Provide senior design direction and hands‑on intervention for priority AI-native products and journeys, from problem framing and concept development through validation, delivery and post‑launch iteration.
• User insight and experience measurement — Set research and measurement practices, embed continuous validation throughout the design lifecycle, and use qualitative and behavioural evidence to improve usability, adoption, confidence and user outcomes.
• AI interaction expertise and patterns — Maintain an authoritative view of emerging conversational, multimodal, adaptive and agentic interaction models, distinguishing enduring user needs from transient trends. Translate relevant developments into practical HSBC guidance and reusable patterns for intent capture, system feedback, transparency, confidence, human oversight, error recovery and control where AI behaviour or outputs may vary.
• Design‑engineering enablement and AI tooling — Shape and scale the tooling and technical foundations connecting design to delivery, including machine‑readable components and tokens, code‑enabled prototypes, design‑to‑build hand‑offs and interfaces enabling approved AI tools and agents to consume design standards. Evaluate and scale tools for generative prototyping, research synthesis, usability testing and automated design, brand, accessibility and compliance checks, working with engineering rather than owning production engineering.
• External engagement and thought leadership — Build relationships with leading practitioners, vendors and research communities to keep HSBC informed, attract talent and strengthen the organisation’s credibility in AI‑native product design.

Qualifications

Experience:

Essential

• Significant design leadership experience at Director, Head of Design or equivalent level, with accountability for design strategy, experience quality, talent and capability across complex digital products, platforms or services.
• Proven ability to lead and influence a distributed design organisation, establish clear standards and operating practices, and improve the consistency and impact of design across multiple teams and channels.
• Experience creating and scaling enterprise design systems, reusable interaction patterns, component libraries and research or measurement practices.
• Strong track record of taking complex digital products from ambiguous problem space through research, design, validation, delivery and scaled adoption.
• Deep specialist knowledge of AI‑native interaction design, including conversational, multimodal, adaptive, generative and agentic experiences and the implications of non‑deterministic behaviour for users.
• Demonstrated ability to distinguish enduring user needs and interaction principles from short‑lived technology trends, and to translate market developments into clear product and design choices.
• Design‑engineering fluency: able to use code‑enabled prototyping and AI‑augmented design tools, understand how systems and components are implemented, and collaborate credibly with senior engineers without needing to be a production engineer.
• Strong understanding of inclusive design, accessibility, responsible AI, privacy, transparency, explainability and human oversight, with experience embedding these into product experiences and governance.
• Experience operating in a large, complex organisation and influencing senior product, technology, design, brand and control stakeholders across organisational and geographic boundaries.
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to make emerging technologies and complex experience trade‑offs clear to executive and multidisciplinary audiences.

Strongly preferred

• Has established AI‑native design principles, standards or governance and embedded them into product development and design review processes.
• Has designed or scaled AI products in a regulated or high‑trust environment where output quality, transparency, control and accountability are central to the experience.
• Experience with design systems that connect directly to code, developer toolkits, coding assistants or agentic workflows.
• Experience designing colleague‑facing and customer‑facing digital products, including enterprise and B2B platforms, across multiple markets and channels.

Essential Capabilities

Cultivates Innovation: Anticipates how AI changes product interaction and design practice, experiments with emerging methods and converts learning into scalable capabilities rather than isolated demonstrations.

Strategic Mindset: Connects AI experience trends, user needs, enterprise standards and delivery realities into a coherent design strategy and sequenced roadmap.

Customer Focus: Starts with user context, intent and evidence; balances familiarity and simplicity with differentiation and protects trust where AI behaviour or outputs vary.

Decision Quality: Applies sound judgement to novel design questions, distinguishes evidence from fashion and makes clear trade‑offs across user value, brand, technology, accessibility and risk.

Action Oriented: Moves rapidly from ambiguity to testable prototypes, brings future‑state concepts to life and turns validated learning into delivered products, standards and tools.

Opening up a world of opportunity
http://www.hsbc.com/careers

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Issued by The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited.