​​Director, AI Experience Design Lead​

Director, AI Experience Design Lead

Location

New York, NY (Primary); alternative locations

La Jolla, CA; South San Francisco, CA; Groton, CT; Tampa, FL; Lake Forest, IL; Cambridge, MA; St. Louis, MO; Collegeville, PA.

Work Arrangement

Onsite – No remote option

What You Will Do

Our client is seeking a Director, AI Experience Design Lead to own how its AI looks, sounds, and behaves, and to build and lead the design team that delivers it.

Our client is putting AI in front of approximately 80,000 colleagues, and every surface needs to feel like it came from the same company.

This role owns that consistency as a product

the AI-first design system behind human and agent experiences. It defines what colleagues see, what agents say, how uncertainty gets disclosed, and how regulated content behaves.

The deliverables are working systems

tokens, patterns, and standards that live in MCP and flow into the build pipeline, so engineers and the Design QA Agent get the correct pattern by default and teams build compliant experiences without waiting on review cycles.

The Director is accountable for the system the way a product owner is accountable for a product: adoption in code, pattern reuse, override rates, and first-pass compliance are the scoreboard. When telemetry shows a pattern failing, the Director retires it.

This role is designed for a highly experienced design leader who brings exceptional executive presence, narrative storytelling ability, and political acumen, while remaining deeply hands-on and invested in growing the people on their team: a player-coach who ships production design work alongside the team and leads complex, high-stakes design initiatives across the client's AI platforms and enterprise LLM integrations.

This is a Director-level role combining people leadership with deep individual contribution. The Director works across every modality the platforms speak (screens, conversation, voice, and agent-to-agent interaction) and moves fluidly between shipping production design work, delivering design standards as code, and growing the team. Deep technical understanding of how LLMs, agents, and modern product stacks behave anchors the role's credibility with Engineering and Product.

Job Responsibilities

• AI Design System Ownership: Own, extend, and evolve the client's AI-first design system across human and agent surfaces: the single source of truth for how the client's AI looks, sounds, and behaves.
• Design Standards as Code: Deliver design standards as code: tokens, patterns, and components shipped into the engineering build pipeline so the correct, compliant pattern is the default, with accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) built in.
• Adoption Tracking & Standards Drift: Track adoption in code (pattern usage, override rate, exception requests) and retire patterns the data shows are not working.
• Experience Metrics: Connect design outcomes to measurable KPIs: adoption, task success, trust, time-to-resolution, and first-pass compliance.
• Lead by Example & Innovation: Set the design bar by shipping: work in the new AI tools first, put innovative work on the table, and show the team how the craft is done now.
• Hands-On Design Delivery: Independently own end-to-end design execution for high-impact, ambiguous initiatives, from problem framing through high-fidelity, interactive, and executive-ready prototypes.
• Agentic & Conversational Design Authority: Act as the design authority for Agentic AI experiences, including systems that plan, reason, invoke tools, and execute multi-step workflows with humans in the loop. Own Conversational UX end-to-end (chat and/or voice), including dialog flows, conversation state, error recovery, escalation, and safe fallback behaviors.
• Assistant Behavior Design: Define assistant behaviors such as tone and voice, refusal patterns, transparency cues, and explainability, designing for edge cases and failure modes in regulated contexts.
• LLM Product Partnership: Partner closely with AI, Data, Product, and Engineering teams to co-own LLM-enabled products that balance autonomy, usability, safety, and trust.
• Craft Excellence: Maintain an exceptional design bar across interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, product thinking, and storytelling.
• Executive Design Advisory: Serve as a trusted design advisor to Product, Engineering, and Executive stakeholders across the client's platform teams and translate complex design and AI concepts into decisions leaders can act on.
• Product Vision & Roadmap: Support product vision and roadmap prioritization, helping Product and Engineering partners evaluate which AI capabilities to build, sequence, or sunset based on user value and experience impact.
• Team Building & Talent Lifecycle: Build, lead, and grow a high-performing team of experience designers: hiring bar, roles and levels, growth paths, and the full talent lifecycle; mentor direct reports by modeling the craft in their own work.
• Budget & Resourcing: Own the team's operating budget and staffing across platforms and initiatives; partner with Finance on annual planning.
• Manage a team of approximately 3–6 direct reports, primarily individual contributors, along with additional matrixed and contingent design resources as needed.
• Collaborate with HR/Talent Acquisition on hiring and organizational design, and with external agency and contractor partners as appropriate.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 10–15+ years of progressive experience in Experience Design, UX, or Product Design, with a proven track record of delivering complex, high-impact digital products and experiences in enterprise or highly matrixed environments.
• 5+ years of direct people management experience, including hiring, developing, and leading high-performing design teams.
• Working fluency with front-end development principles, APIs, and design-token pipelines, sufficient to partner with Engineering on delivering design standards as code.
• Experience owning and evolving design systems and AI-first interaction patterns at scale to ensure scalability, consistency, and quality.
• Deep expertise in AI-driven experience design, including hands-on experience designing Agentic AI workflows and Conversational UX (chat and/or voice), such as dialog flows, conversation state management, repair and fallback patterns, escalation models, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Advanced understanding of how AI systems behave, communicate, and build trust, including experience designing transparency cues, explainability patterns, refusal behaviors, safety guardrails, and responsible AI interaction models.
• Exceptional design judgment and craft excellence, with the ability to independently produce end-to-end design work from problem framing through high-fidelity, interactive, and executive-ready prototypes.
• Outstanding executive communication and storytelling skills, including the ability to clearly articulate, justify, and defend design decisions to senior leadership and diverse stakeholder groups.
• Expertise in accessibility and inclusive design, with hands-on experience ensuring WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across digital products and platforms.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to synthesize qualitative and quantitative inputs into clear design direction and actionable insights.
• A robust portfolio demonstrating system-level thinking, AI-powered experiences, and rapid prototyping approaches, including design standards or components shipped as production code.
• Strong digital literacy and an AI-first mindset, with the ability to critically evaluate and integrate generative tools into the creative process to solve complex design challenges at scale.
• Ability to manage multiple complex programs and projects simultaneously.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong product design experience (not only UI): partnering with Product/Engineering to shape scope, prioritize tradeoffs, and define measurable outcomes.
• Hands-on building with LLM APIs or agent frameworks to prototype real agent behavior in code, not only static interfaces.
• Advanced prompt engineering skills, using prompts as detailed creative briefs that set parameters, constraints, and brand identity.
• Expertise in working within lean or agile environments with fast-paced, iterative product cycles.
• Track record of building design teams from the ground up, including hiring, onboarding, and career-pathing frameworks.
• Experience with AI experience evaluation approaches: conversation quality testing, scenario-based risk testing, and iterative improvement loops tied to product metrics.

Expert-Level Skills

• Craft Mastery: A recognized authority in interaction, visual, and conversation design; independently produces work from ambiguous brief to production-ready execution.
• Design-Engineering Fluency: Operates where design and engineering converge; ships tokens, patterns, and standards as code and engages engineers on implementation tradeoffs.
• Agentic AI Expertise: Deep working knowledge of how LLMs and agentic systems behave; designs trustworthy, transparent, and explainable experiences and anticipates failure modes.
• Multi-Audience Communication: Communicates design rationale from engineering standups to executive forums and translates complex AI and design concepts into decisions leaders can act on.
• Problem Discovery: Turns ambiguous, high-stakes briefs into clear design problems; the go-to person for the least defined design challenges on the client's AI platforms.

Work Schedule & Travel

• Occasional travel may be required for workshops, team meetings, or stakeholder engagement.
• Flexibility to work across global time zones as needed.
• This position requires onsite work at one of the designated client locations. Remote work is not available.

Join Our Team at Atlas

Atlas is a global strategic consulting firm, focused on the Life Sciences industry. Our services include Management Consulting, Managed Services and Agile Services. Global pharmaceutical companies and emerging players in life sciences depend on Atlas consultants to ensure they have the capabilities that will give them the ability to succeed. We are seeking Atlas IMPACT Makers who are ready to lead and innovate in dynamic environments. IMPACT Makers embody the principles of Atlas, driving transformative change and delivering outstanding results.

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. We value diversity and inclusion in our workplace and are committed to creating an environment where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed