Director of Design and User Research - Netlify (Remote)
Netlify is looking for a user experience and design director to lead, nurture, and grow their incredible product design team. The ideal candidate is someone that has led and grown design teams, has a track record of successful mentorship, and has a design vision and skillset aligned to accelerate Netlify’s ambition of a world-class developer experience for web developers. The candidate should have demonstrable success launching and iterating world-class design experiences with their team. To view the application and apply, click here.
At Netlify, we’re building a platform to empower digital designers and developers to build better, more elaborate web projects than ever before. We’re aiming to change the landscape of modern web development. Netlify currently serves more than 1,000,000 developers worldwide.
Netlify is a diverse group of incredible talent from all over the world. We’re ~40% woman or non-binary, and are composed of 29 different nationalities.
Our most recent fundraise was $63M in Series C to bring forward the next generation of tooling for a more accessible web. This latest round brings Netlify’s funding raised in total to $107M to date. Among our investors are Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, EQT Ventures as well as the founders of GitHub, Slack, Figma and Yelp.
What we're looking for
This person should be a strong partner with product and engineering and should push us to constantly and consistently deliver a great user experience. The candidate should have experience in implementing and leading design processes and systems. They should be well versed and opinionated in modern design best practices, utilizing quantitative and qualitative data as part of the design process, and bring fresh ideas and methods for product design and discovery.
The ideal candidate should be passionate about injecting design thinking into our product process and has demonstrable ability doing so. They've lead initiatives like design sprints and have onboarded engineering and product teams into design-thinking processes, making it integral to the product development process. They fight for the end-user while balancing the overall product and business needs of the org. The candidate should show wins of their design teams being integral to the success of their products and companies, contributing new ideas and big product wins, and creating a system around doing so.
About the role:
This role will oversee the product design team which includes Product Designers and User Researchers. In this role, you will have individual contributors reporting to you. You will also need to help hire and grow the team.
You should love helping your team grow and develop, taking care of their professional growth needs as well as quality of day-to-day work life, being an advocate for their work and developing a strong sense of direction.
You'll be a confident leader with the ability to facilitate conversations and decision-making within the team. You'll be responsible for setting, tracking and communicating metrics around work output and goals.
In addition to people management responsibilities, you will need to establish a hiring process for the Product design and research. You will focus on building a happy, healthy and diverse team.
You will work to help develop metrics for your function that represent their work and contributions.
You will also work closely with other managers and leaders within the organization to plan projects, schedule resourcing for those projects and identify risks.
We are a largely distributed organization, working productively across different time zones is key to success in this role. Fostering good habits of documentation, empathy, and integrity to deliver on committed work are some of the key elements on our team. Experience working and managing remote teams is a big plus.
Ideal Candidate
Experience leading teams of Product Designers & User Researchers through the complete product discovery to delivery life cycle.
A champion for product usability and someone who removes roadblocks so teams can continue to work closely together as we scale the organization.
Familiar with the tool sets the teams use (Figma, GitHub, Notion, Storybook, Miro, etc.)
Ability to hire thoughtfully and quickly.
Ability to develop the individual's skills and professional careers of Product Designers and researchers.
Can supervise work priorities and direction by collaborating with the PM and development teams.
Ability to work across multiple time zones with remote colleagues
A desire to succeed personally through the success of the team
About Netlify
Of everything we've ever built at Netlify, we are most proud of our team.
We believe that empowered and engaged colleagues do their best work. We’ll be giving you the tools you need to succeed and looking to you for suggestions to improve not just in your daily job, but every aspect of building a company. As a distributed-first organization we want to make sure wherever our team is we find inventive ways to collaborate, debate, and learn from each other.
To learn a bit more about our team and who we are, make sure to visit our about page.
Applying
Not sure you meet 100% of our qualifications? Please apply anyway!
When applying please include: A resume or short listing of your job history & skills. (A link to a LinkedIn profile would be fine). A cover letter explaining why you would enjoy working in this role and why you’d like to work at Netlify would be great, though not required & will not impact your application. When we receive your application we’ll get back to you about the next steps.
Netlify is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are devoted to building a team of people with diverse backgrounds and lifestyles. We believe that the unique contributions of all Netlifolks is the driver of our success. We are all responsible for bringing on people from all walks of life. Driving equality empowers our team, enables us to innovate, and helps us maintain a more inclusive environment. We don’t discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, race, military/veteran status, citizenship, pregnancy status, or any other differences. If we can do anything to provide a better interview, i.e. accommodate a disability, then please let us know.