Design Director: AI-Driven Product Experience

FrontApp Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Health insurance

Parental leave

Flexible time off

WFH policy

Lifestyle stipend

Wellness days

Winter Break

Job summary

Front is seeking a Design Director to lead the Product Design team and elevate craft, speed, and impact across core workflows. This senior leader will shape teams, systems, and a culture of high accountability to deliver exceptional experiences.

You’ll partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align design decisions with customer outcomes, drive crisp tradeoffs, and build an AI-forward design practice while protecting quality and trust.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of product design experience with substantial time leading teams in complex product environments.
• Strong track record designing and shipping workflow-heavy, data-rich experiences (e.g., routing/assignment, dashboards, analytics).
• Proven experience building, evolving, and governing a design system that improved consistency and shipping velocity.
• Excellent cross-functional leadership—able to partner deeply with Product and Engineering to drive clarity and execution.
• Executive-level communication: strong storytelling, sharp judgment, and comfort presenting tradeoffs and recommendations.
• Experience defining AI-enabled design practices and tools across a team (or a clear, credible point of view).

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of product designers (including managing managers as the org scales), setting clear expectations and coaching to raise the craft bar.
• Establish a strong operating cadence (critiques, design reviews, planning, decision-making) that improves quality, clarity, and throughput.
• Raise design quality across Front’s core workflows—queues, routing/assignment, rules/automation, and analytics—shipping high-craft improvements that measurably increase usability and adoption.
• Ensure experiences feel fast, clear, and intuitive even when systems are complex and data-heavy; model strong interaction, visual polish, and systems thinking.
• Evolve and govern the design system (tokens, components, governance, collaboration model) so design and engineering can ship 2–3× faster with confidence.
• Operationalize an AI-first design process from research to prototyping to engineering handoff—accelerating iteration, reducing rework, and setting AI-forward standards while protecting quality and customer trust.

Skills

Design leadership

Design systems

UX design

AI in design

Cross-functional leadership

Executive storytelling

Job description

Front is seeking a Design Director to lead the Product Design team and elevate craft, speed, and impact across core workflows. This senior leader will shape teams, systems, and a culture of high accountability to deliver exceptional experiences.

You’ll partner with Product and Engineering leadership to align design decisions with customer outcomes, drive crisp tradeoffs, and build an AI-forward design practice while protecting quality and trust.