Director, Digital Product Design

HP IQ; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Disability insurance

Employee assistance program

Flexible spending account

Life insurance

Parental leave (4-12 weeks) and paid休

Job summary

HP IQ is seeking a Director of Digital Product Design to lead a team of senior designers and design engineers. You will shape the creative direction for HP's software experiences, balancing ambitious craft with shipping cadence.

This role emphasizes AI-native design workflows and close collaboration with AI/ML, hardware, and product leadership. You will advocate for users, defend quality, and set rituals for critique and production.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in digital product design.
• Portfolio demonstrating both personal design excellence and ability to elevate team output.
• Proven experience shipping AI-powered or technically complex consumer products.
• Working knowledge of LLMs and AI-assisted workflows (Claude, Cursor, Codex).
• Strong technical fluency to discuss architecture and tradeoffs with engineers.
• Track record of building healthy, high-performing design teams.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ability to provide clarity in undefined spaces.
• Excellent communication and storytelling across disciplines.

Responsibilities

• Lead, hire, and grow a team of senior product designers and design engineers.
• Define and evolve the creative direction for software design across product lines.
• Build team culture with critique practices and collaboration norms.
• Drive the design point of view and protect quality as a first-class priority.
• Partner with engineering, AI/ML, hardware, and product leadership from strategy to shipping.
• Balance deep exploratory work with accountable shipping cadence.
• Mentor leads and seniors through ambiguity and growth.
• Champion craft in motion, typography, and micro-interactions.
• Translate design decisions for senior leadership to build conviction.

Skills

Digital product design

Design leadership

AI-powered design

LLMs and generative AI

Engineering collaboration

Storytelling and communication

Education

Portfolio demonstrating excellence and leadership

Tools

SwiftUI

React

Origami

Claude

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Who We Are

HP IQ is HP’s new AI innovation lab. Combining startup agility with HP’s global scale, we’re building intelligent technologies that redefine how the world works, creates, and collaborates.

About The Role

The IQ Design team creates simple, delightful, and transformative user experiences. We're a team of product designers, design engineers, and systems thinkers exploring what computing looks like when it truly works for people. Our work spans new hardware platforms, new software experiences, and the emerging spaces between them.

This is a design-led group. Design doesn't support product development here; it drives it. We have strong opinions about what makes an experience worth using, and we expect leadership that shares that conviction. The person in this role will set the bar for quality, advocate for the user when priorities compete, and make the case (again and again, if needed) that craft is not a nice-to-have.

We're looking for a Director of Digital Product Design to lead this team. You'll manage and grow a group of senior designers and design engineers, setting the creative direction for how our software looks, feels, and behaves. This isn't a role where you disappear into strategy decks. You'll stay close to the work, shaping the culture of a team that prototypes fast, cares deeply about craft, and ships products that matter.

The right person for this role believes that great design teams are built, not assembled. You'll have significant autonomy to define how your team works together: the rituals, the critique culture, the way ideas move from exploration to production. You care as much about creating the conditions for other people to do their best work as you do about the work itself. You know how to build trust across disciplines, protect creative space, and still hold a high bar for what ships.

This is also a role for someone who understands that AI is fundamentally changing how design gets done, not just what we design but how we design it. Your team will be AI-native designers who use tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex as part of their daily workflow. You should be fluent enough in LLMs and generative AI to have strong opinions about where these tools accelerate great work and where they undermine it.

What You Might Do

• Lead, hire, and grow a team of senior product designers, design engineers, and intelligent systems designers working across HP's software experiences
• Define and evolve the creative direction for software design across HP's current and future product lines
• Build team culture intentionally: critique practices, collaboration norms, and creative rituals that bring out the best in your people
• Drive the design point of view. Ensure that experience quality is treated as a first-class priority, not something that gets negotiated away under pressure
• Partner with engineering, AI/ML, hardware, and product leadership to ensure design has appropriately shaped the work from strategy through shipping
• Create space for deep exploratory work while maintaining accountability for shipping cadence and product quality
• Guide the team's adoption of AI-native design workflows, helping designers and design engineers integrate LLMs and generative tools into prototyping, iteration, and production
• Mentor leads and seniors, supporting their growth and helping them navigate the ambiguity that comes with designing for emerging technology
• Champion design craft across the organization: the motion, the typography, the micro-interactions that make experiences feel alive
• Represent the team's work and perspective to senior leadership, translating design decisions into language that builds organizational conviction

Essential Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in digital product design, with at least 3 years managing and growing design teams
• A portfolio (or body of work) that demonstrates both personal design excellence and the ability to elevate the output of a team
• Proven experience shipping AI-powered or otherwise technically complex consumer products
• Working knowledge of LLMs, how they work, what they're good at, where they break down, and a clear point of view on how tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and similar AI-assisted workflows are reshaping the practice of software design
• Strong technical fluency. You don't need to write production code, but you should be able to have substantive conversations with engineers about architecture, feasibility, and implementation tradeoffs
• Track record of building healthy, high-performing team cultures where people do career-defining work
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to bring clarity and direction to undefined problem spaces
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to build conviction across disciplines and levels of seniority

Preferred Skills

• Hands-on experience prototyping with tools like SwiftUI, React, Origami, or AI or web technologies, enough to evaluate and guide the work of design engineers
• Background working in design-led organizations where design and engineering are deeply integrated rather than siloed
• Experience designing AI-first systems: memory, personalization, generative interfaces, conversational or agentic experiences
• Familiarity with motion design, animation principles, and the craft details that differentiate good software from great software
• Experience building or scaling design systems, component libraries, and shared design infrastructure
• Interest in the intersection of digital and physical product experiences
• Background in creative coding, computational design, or experimental interface work

Salary: $220,00- $280,000

Compensation & Benefits (Full-Time Employees)

The salary range for this role is listed above. Final salary offered is based upon multiple factors including individual job-related qualifications, education, experience, knowledge and skills.

At HP IQ, we offer a competitive and comprehensive benefits package, including:

• Health insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Long term/short term disability insurance
• Employee assistance program
• Flexible spending account
• Life insurance
• Generous time off policies, including; 4-12 weeks fully paid parental leave based on tenure, 11 paid holidays, Additional flexible paid vacation and sick leave (US benefits overview)

Why HP IQ?

• Innovative Work Help shape the future of intelligent computing and workplace transformation.
• Autonomy and Agility Work with the speed and focus of a startup, backed by HP’s scale.
• Meaningful Impact Build AI-powered solutions that help people and organisations thrive.
• Flexible Work Environment Freedom and flexibility to do your best work.
• Forward-Thinking Culture We learn fast, stay future-focused, and imagine what comes next—together.

Equal Opportunity Employer (EEO) Statement

HP, Inc. provides equal employment opportunity to all employees and prospective employees, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, sexual orientation, age, disability, or status as a protected veteran, marital status, familial status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic predisposition or carrier status, uniformed service status, political affiliation or any other characteristic protected by applicable national, federal, state, and local law(s).

Please be assured that you will not be subject to any adverse treatment if you choose to disclose the information requested. This information is provided voluntarily. The information obtained will be kept in strict confidence.