Design Lead

About the Role

We are hiring a design lead: a player-coach for someone who still loves to design while also having a passion to make other designers better.

This role sit within Roo’s product team, which owns product and design craft across the company. The product team supports a number of squads (aka business units), the cross-functional teams accountable for driving the success of the key pillars of our marketplace. Designers are aligned to one or more squads to deliver meaningful business impact but formally sit within the product team to ensure we are creating a cohesive product experience across squads. Holding that tension well is at the core of this job.

As a player-coach, you'll spend real time in Figma owning a few projects end-to-end to drive measurable business impact for one or more business units. At the same time, you’ll help set the quality bar across our full product surface by defining what design excellence means at Roo, and making it stick. You'll grow and coach the team, raise the craft, and build the practices that let design scale with the company.

This role is remote, with occasional travel to our San Francisco co-working space for key meetings and team events.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow the 5 person Product Design team. Support designers in developing strong craft, critical thinking, and strategic influence.
• Evolve our design competencies into a standard the whole company can understand and then make it operate. Today that bar largely lives in people's heads. Making it explicit, defensible, and consistently applied.
• Support career growth by running development conversations, writing performance reviews with business-unit leaders, and making the path from one level to the next clear
• Take on real design work yourself. Everything from hard problems, quick wins, exploratory concepts, and the things that unblock the team.
• Partner with leadership to align design direction with product strategy and company goals.
• Build and strengthen design systems that enable consistency, quality, and scalability. This includes raising the team's leverage with AI by helping to drive forward efforts to make our design system agentic-friendly so prototypes can be built from real components.
• Shape design practices across discovery, concept development, interaction design, prototyping, and delivery.
• Encourage exploration and push the team to rethink assumptions while staying grounded in user needs and market realities.
• Advocate for the customer experience across every surface and ensure design decisions always reflect real customer needs.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of product design experience with 2+ years of management experience
• Demonstrated ability to grow, coach, and support senior designers in improving their craft and helping them extend their skillset from strong execution toward strategic influence
• Strong portfolio demonstrating excellence across visual design, interaction design, systems thinking, product storytelling, and user centered craft.
• Experience building and scaling design systems.
• AI fluency in design practice. You've used AI to move faster on real work and you have a considered view on where it helps and where it produces work that shouldn't ship.
• Ability to bring clarity to ambiguous spaces and turn loose ideas into compelling product concepts.
• Strong cross functional communication skills and experience working closely with cross-functional leadership
• Experience with a variety of user research methods. You know how to get answers from users yourself and help your designers do the same.
• Excitement about shaping the future of the industry by designing experiences that support meaningful work.
• Experience leading design across multiple products or surfaces. Two-sided marketplace experience is a strong plus.

While we are a remote first company, if you are based in San Francisco this will be a hybrid role. 

Please see below for compensation ranges based on our geographical tiering system recommended by external benchmark data (with example cities listed).

Note: We’ve recently been made aware of a job scam where scammers are posing as Roo employees and conducting fake text interviews. Please note that any communication from @lifeatroo.com is not legitimate. All official Roo communication will always come from @roo.vet.