Director, Design Systems & Operations

Summary

Join Aledade's Experience Design and Research (XDR) team as a Director of Design Systems & Operations and lead a team focused on enhancing XDR team effectiveness and design quality. You will optimize team-wide processes and toolsets, championing and scaling the Aledade design system. This role involves strategizing resource allocation, risk assessment, and team development, partnering with Product, Business, and Engineering teams. You will develop senior team members and ensure high-quality execution aligned with business needs. The ideal candidate will have 10+ years of UX-related experience, including design systems leadership and people management. This position offers a comprehensive benefits package, including flexible work schedules, remote work options, and various health and wellness benefits.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional experience in UX-related disciplines (e.g. product design, research, content strategy, design engineering, front-end development) working on end-to-end digital experiences with cross-functional teams in iterative environments
• Prior experience leading design systems for a team of designers and their associated product, design, and engineering teams
• People management experience, including management of designers and/or engineers
• Experience with hiring individual contributors in any of the following UX-related disciplines (design, research, content strategy, front-end engineering, program management)
• Demonstrated experience and skill in leading, facilitating, & executing complex, iterative design workstreams that span digital and non-digital touchpoints with diverse stakeholders of varying degrees of familiarity with design
• Proven experience planning work capacity for user experience disciplines, and crafting and managing a roadmap of design projects across multiple, related domains, managing multiple projects simultaneously and meeting deadlines effectively
• Experience facilitating design critiques and design review forums for your and other designers’ work
• Superb communication skills and proven storytelling ability – can clearly articulate the what, why, and how of their approaches and tailor a message to the audience
• Must be able to work at a computer for prolonged periods of time
• Must be effective at managing one’s time, energy, and productivity in a mostly remote working environment

Responsibilities

• Balance projects across a portfolio of work and a matrixed organization, guiding your team’s priorities based on your assessment of potential impact and alignment with company priorities and user needs
• Coordinate with peer leaders to align time, people, and projects on a yearly and quarterly time horizon
• Ensure your team’s execution is consistently high quality and aligned with business, user, technology, and market needs
• Develop and maintain processes that support the team and allow them to focus
• Skillfully leverage multiple types of data to prioritize operational and design needs, and share your knowledge with cross functional teams to aid in decision making that focuses on user and business impact
• Develop and regularly share operational metrics that measure success of the work and reveal opportunity areas for continued growth
• Develop and articulate strategy at multiple levels both to inspire and align teams involved in executing on the day to day work
• Craft tailored narratives and compelling stories for different audiences that help them adopt and benefit from key systems and operational tools that deliver value for their unique needs
• Play an active role in developing the skills of your team members, supporting them in achieving their desired growth, and securing additional resourcing with inclusive hiring practices when team growth is needed

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in design system, design ops, or design program management roles
• Experience leading the in-house design delivery of software in a complex enterprise industry, B2B2C, or regulated industry (healthcare, finance, enterprise SAAS)
• Experience working closely with Product Management and Engineering teams
• Prior success partnering closely with engineering leaders and teams to strategize and plan improvements to front-end architecture systems and/or use of third party frameworks
• Proficiency with agile, scrum, or other iterative software development processes and experience with common product prioritization and project management methods
• Fluency with Figma, UI libraries,  token-based architectures, and emerging AI tools for design and development
• Experience scaling teams and scaling team operations
• Experience facilitating workshops or design sprints

Benefits

• Flexible work schedules and the ability to work remotely are available for many roles
• Health, dental and vision insurance paid up to 80% for employees, dependents and domestic partners
• Robust time-off plan (21 days of PTO in your first year)
• Two paid volunteer days and 11 paid holidays
• 12 weeks paid parental leave for all new parents
• Six weeks paid sabbatical after six years of service
• Educational Assistant Program and Clinical Employee Reimbursement Program
• 401(k) with up to 4% match
• Stock options