Director of Product Design, Avail

About the role

This role will partner closely with senior leaders in Product and Engineering to create and execute against our bold vision for transforming the real estate industry. You will be responsible for design decisions and patterns for multiple products and ensuring their adoption by product designers. You’ll build on the design system foundation by enhancing toolchain connections between design files and code, promoting education and advocacy, and collaborating closely with cross-functional teams across all platforms. A team of designers will report to this role, and you will closely partner with a sibling engineering team. You will also collaborate with cross-functional leaders on team capacity and skills, and work with other design leaders to drive the strategy and execution of Design Ops tools and processes to create a more scalable and efficient design practice. This role reports to the Head of Avail.

Responsibilities

• Own the Avail design system. Define and evolve the components, patterns, and tokens powering Avail's Renter, Landlord, and Public surfaces, and drive their adoption across the design team.
• Raise the bar on product and feature design. Set the quality standard for end-to-end product design across Avail. Review and guide feature work to keep the experience cohesive as the product grows.
• Make accessibility the default. Build accessible patterns and tokens into the system itself, and grow the team's fluency so a11y is designed in from the start rather than retrofitted.
• Keep design and code in lockstep. Partner with your engineering counterpart to align components across design and code, and advance a connected toolchain between Figma and the codebase.
• Document so the system scales. Maintain clear, accessible documentation and contribution processes for every component, so designers and engineers can move without you in the room.
• Make the case for the system. Translate the value of design systems and accessibility into language Product, Engineering, and executive partners care about, grounded in business and quality metrics.
• Plan a roadmap that ships. Sequence systems and accessibility work into a prioritized roadmap that maps to engineering's release pipeline and Avail's product timelines.
• Extend the system to the brand. Partner with Brand and Marketing on consistency across external-facing assets, and maintain the icon and illustration libraries.
• Grow the team. Mentor and manage a team of product designers, supporting their craft and career development and ensuring healthy coverage across projects.
• Run a lean design practice. Partner with wider RDC design leadership on capacity, tooling, and process. Keep workflows healthy in Jira and Confluence without letting ops become overhead.
• Lead as a player-coach. Balance strategic leadership and team management with rolling up your sleeves to actively design, build, and ship components alongside your team.
• Architect and implement the system. Own the hands-on execution of moving designs from Figma into production code, drawing on deep past experience of launching and maintaining systems in real-world codebases.
• Incorporate AI into the design workflow. Explore, pilot, and implement AI-assisted design tooling and workflows to automate routine documentation, optimize component handoff, and accelerate the design-to-code pipeline.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience working in the design industry
• 3+ years of working in a product-led organization
• 5+ years of providing design direction and mentoring to colleagues in a leadership role
• 5+ years leading a design systems and product design team
• Proven implementation track record: Deep, hands-on experience not just designing systems, but successfully deploying and maintaining them inside active engineering codebases and production environments.
• A "doing" mindset: A rich portfolio proving you are just as comfortable designing individual design tokens and complex components as you are managing a team roadmap.
• Practical AI experience: Familiarity with leveraging AI design tools, LLMs, or automation workflows to optimize design operations and scaling efficiency.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
• Experience delivering multiple projects simultaneously with cross-disciplined teams
• Experience with capacity planning and workload management
• Knowledge of Figma, JIRA, and project management tools

Skills

• A strong visual aesthetic and design point of view
• Informed and strong opinions, loosely held
• A practitioner of user-centric processes and design thinking principles
• Exemplifies a "We, Not Me" attitude

Schedule

For most roles, our employees work three or more days in our offices, where they have the opportunity to collaborate in-person.

Benefits

• Inclusive and Competitive medical, Rx, dental, and vision coverage
• Family forming benefits
• 13 Paid Holidays
• Flexible Time Off
• 8 hours of paid Volunteer Time off
• Immediate eligibility into Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match
• Tuition Reimbursement program for degreed and non-degreed programs
• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location