Experience Design Director — Remote-Eligible Strategy Leader

Proto; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Proto in New York leads innovation and transformation through experience design at scale. The Director, Experience Design owns experience direction on our most demanding engagements, translating complexity into clear artifacts and driving decisions with executive audiences.

The role is hands-on and accountable, setting direction, leading teams, and ensuring delivery end-to-end while shaping Proto's Experience practice as the department grows.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in experience design, service design, interaction design, or systems design within innovation, consultancy, product, or venture-building contexts.
• Undergraduate and/or graduate degree in design, human-centered computing, psychology, engineering, or a related field.
• Proven ability to own complex projects from early framing through delivery, with a portfolio showing systems-level judgment and depth of thinking, not just surface polish.
• Fluency in journey mapping, interaction modeling, service blueprints, prototyping, and usability evaluation combined with an understanding of technical constraints, tradeoffs, and system behavior.
• Experience turning ambiguous, high-stakes problems into structured design direction that informs product, investment, or organizational decisions.
• Proven ability to lead senior stakeholders through uncertainty, and to make design decisions legible to people who are not designers.
• Experience managing and developing designers, with evidence that people got measurably better working for you.
• Operational resilience, including the ability to maintain quality under pressure, manage multiple workstreams, and work through periods of intensity and change.
• Good judgment and low ego. Able to stay calm under pressure and handle disagreement constructively.

Responsibilities

• Own experience direction by setting the design point of view on an engagement, defining experience principles and goals, and holding the work to them from framing through delivery.
• Organize systems around behavior: model how work actually gets done across users, systems, and touchpoints, identify where value concentrates, and use that to define what the system should be.
• Make the future tangible by bringing prototypes, demos, and simulations upstream so clients can evaluate a direction while it is still cheap to change, calibrating fidelity to the decision at hand.
• Carry work from concept to pilot, moving ideas through sketches, wireframes, and proofs of concept into piloting and execution, and staying involved as real-world feedback reshapes the design.
• Lead client decision-making by facilitating working sessions and presenting to executive audiences clearly and directly, using narrative and concrete artifacts to move decisions forward.
• Build and lead the team: manage and develop designers, set clear expectations, give direct feedback, and own delivery end-to-end so complexity resolves at your level rather than escalating.
• Advance the Experience practice by contributing to internal methods, patterns, and external points of view, and help define what Experience Design at Proto is as the department grows.

Skills

Experience design

Service design

Interaction design

Systems design

Portfolio of systems-level thinking

Education

Design, human-centered computing, psychology, engineering degree

Job description

Proto in New York leads innovation and transformation through experience design at scale. The Director, Experience Design owns experience direction on our most demanding engagements, translating complexity into clear artifacts and driving decisions with executive audiences.

The role is hands-on and accountable, setting direction, leading teams, and ensuring delivery end-to-end while shaping Proto's Experience practice as the department grows.