Design Lead - Data Platform

Role overview

Design Lead — Data Platform will own end-to-end product design for an early-stage, data-dense enterprise platform for regulated organizations. This is a build-stage role with broad product thinking—not a pure UI/UX position.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end product design vision for a data-dense enterprise platform.
• Translate complex workflows (data lineage, migration impact, governance, blast-radius analysis) into clear, navigable product experiences.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to define what to build, for whom, and why.
• Design for two audiences simultaneously:
  • Technical users who need depth
  • Senior stakeholders who need confidence in decisions
• Build and maintain a design system (components, quality bar, repeatable standards).
• Run user discovery and research, then convert insights into product direction, design decisions, and prioritization input.
• Use AI across the design workflow (research synthesis, ideation, prototyping, iteration, productivity).

Requirements

• Senior or lead-level product design experience in enterprise/B2B SaaS or similarly complex environments.
• Strong product thinking—influenced what gets built and why.
• Portfolio demonstrating experience designing complex, data-dense interfaces (dashboards, graphs, visualizations, technical workflows, enterprise tools).
• Strong information design and data visualization instincts.
• Experience delivering and maintaining a design system from components/standards through adoption.
• Proven ability to work closely with Product and Engineering, taking ideas from concept to shipped.
• Experience building a design function, practice, or product design standard from scratch.
• AI fluency with concrete examples of real design work and outcomes.

Nice to have

• Experience designing for technical audiences (developers, data engineers, analysts, platform teams).
• Familiarity with lineage/graph visualization, data governance, migration impact analysis, metadata products.
• Experience with regulated industries (financial services, insurance, healthcare, government).

Work style / expectations

• Customer-problem first; seek real user needs before designing solutions.
• Player-coach: hands-on while setting standards for quality and product judgment.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making practical calls with incomplete information.
• Ability to raise the design bar without slowing an early-stage product.