Senior Director, User Experience

About this position:

We're looking for a Senior Director, User Experience to lead design across Later's product portfolio, spanning Later Influence, Later Social, and Mavely. You'll build and lead a team of 5 to 6 UX designers, partnering closely with roughly 10 product managers and an engineering organization of 100+ developers to ship experiences that are cohesive, intuitive, and scalable across our lines of business. Reporting to the Chief Product Officer, you'll be the systems thinker who connects design decisions across teams into one coherent product experience, setting the design standards, patterns, and processes that let Later move fast without fragmenting the product. This is a high-visibility role with regular exposure to senior leadership and direct influence over how brands and creators experience Later's platform. This is a remote position managing a remote team. Travel is required 1-2 times per quarter.

What you'll be doing:

Forward Deployed Execution with Strategy & Systems Thinking

• Embed directly as a hands-on, principal contributor on Later's most critical zero-to-one product bets, operating at the intersection of design, product strategy, and engineering execution.
• Drive rapid, high-fidelity experimentation by turning abstract business requirements into functional prototypes, bypassing traditional wireframing phases to validate ideas immediately in the browser.
• Act as the ultimate safeguard for user experience on flagship launches, jumping in with the team to unblock strategic initiatives through direct co-creation.
• Translate business strategy and customer insight into a design roadmap that supports growth, stickiness, and commercial outcomes.
• Identify and resolve structural gaps in the product experience that individual teams, working in isolation, would not catch.

AI & Agentic Mastery

• Pioneer and execute agentic UX workflows, building functional AI prototypes that unify product design across Later Social, Later Influence, and Mavely.
• Architect and codify the UI/UX patterns for human-in-the-loop interactions, AI trust mechanisms, and agentic failure states by actively building and testing prompts and context windows alongside engineering partners.
• Integrate generative AI and computational design practices into the daily workflows of the product organization, setting the standard for how AI accelerates UX exploration and research synthesis.

Leadership and Mentorship

• Lead, mentor, and elevate a high-performing team of UX designers by shifting the culture from traditional screen-design to an AI-native, builder-first mindset.
• Upskill the design team in applied prompt engineering, computational design thinking, and the use of AI tools.
• Replace standard administrative critique rituals with active build sessions, setting a relentless quality bar where the team is expected to rapidly turn ideas into near-working experiences rather than static mocks.
• Recruit and develop design talent, building a bench that matches Later's growth trajectory.
• Foster a culture of craft, curiosity, and ownership, ensuring the team is motivated and set up to do their best work.

Cross-functional Partnership

• Partner closely with the CPO and CTO to align design investment with company priorities, and co-create the product and technology strategy, vision, and roadmap.
• Accelerate delivery across the 100+ developer organization by implementing robust design tokens and AI-assisted design-to-code pipelines, removing the friction between design intent and shipped reality.
• Partner deeply with the roughly 10 product managers to compress discovery cycles, using AI-driven usability analysis and rapid prototyping to materially shorten the path from customer problem to tested solution.
• Co-author front-end architecture strategies with engineering leadership, ensuring UX standards are scalable, API-aware, and built on shared logic rather than fragmented static screens.
• Represent design in company-wide planning and prioritization conversations, ensuring UX is a first-class input to roadmap decisions.

Craft and Quality

• Set and hold the bar for design craft across the portfolio, from interaction design to visual polish.
• Champion accessibility and usability best practices across every product surface.
• Balance speed and quality, knowing when to push for polish and when to ship and iterate.

Research and Insights

• Build a lightweight, repeatable approach to user research that keeps design decisions grounded in real customer and creator behavior.
• Translate research and usage data into design priorities that connect to measurable product and business outcomes.
• Make AI-assisted exploration, prototyping, research synthesis, usability analysis, and design-to-development workflows part of the team's operating model, materially shortening the path from customer problem to tested solution before significant engineering investment.
• Model and drive a proactive, learning approach with internal stakeholders and customer and user personas, creating a culture of curiosity where the team becomes deeply familiar with customer and stakeholder workflows, pain points, and needs.

What success looks like:

• Within the first 30 days, you've met the design team, key PM and engineering partners, and have a clear read on where the product experience is strong and where it's fragmented.
• Within 90 days, you've established a design operating rhythm (critique, planning, quality bar) and identified the first systems-level fix that will meaningfully improve consistency across product lines.
• Within 6 months, a shared design system is in active use across teams, design is embedded early in product discovery, and AI-assisted prototyping and experimentation are materially accelerating the path from idea to validated experience.
• Within 12 months, the UX team operates with clear ownership, predictable delivery, and measurable improvement in usability and consistency across Later's full product portfolio, and you're recognized as a trusted design voice at the leadership table.

What you bring:

We are committed to building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best and most rewarding work of your career. If you identify with any of the following, we encourage you to apply!

• 10+ years of experience in product design or UX, including 5+ years leading and growing a design team.
• Proven experience operating as a systems thinker, designing for coherence across multiple products or teams, not just within one workstream.
• Strong technical fluency and a track record partnering deeply with engineering on platform architecture, APIs, data models, frontend frameworks, and implementation tradeoffs; able to make design decisions that are ambitious, scalable, and grounded in how the product is actually built.
• Experience building or scaling a design system, pattern library, or shared UX standards across a growing product surface.
• Strong facilitation and communication skills, comfortable presenting design direction to senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring and developing designers at varying levels of seniority, and comfortable balancing hands-on craft with strategic, portfolio-level thinking.
• Demonstrated proficiency with AI-assisted design, prototyping, and development tools, able to rapidly turn ideas into working or near-working experiences rather than relying exclusively on static mocks.
• Experience in B2B SaaS, marketplace, or platform products is a plus; experience in influencer marketing, creator economy, or social/commerce adjacent spaces is a bonus.

How you work:

• How we work:
• We will do whatever it takes to win: We win when our customers and creators win. We bring full commitment to outcomes that matter, not just effort.
• We have no limit to our aspiration: We think big, push beyond what seems possible, and refuse to let conventional thinking set the ceiling.
• We are relentless: We keep going. Through ambiguity, setbacks, and competing priorities, we find a way forward.
• We deeply understand our business: If we don't have the knowledge, we figure it out. We take ownership of understanding how Later works and what drives results.
• We take our work seriously, but not ourselves: We bring rigor and accountability without ego, and we make space for each other to do our best work.