Director, Product Design

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Define and lead the vision for Dropbox’s next-generation design system, transforming it from a component library into a comprehensive product experience platform encompassing patterns, primitives, standards, and shared product logic.

• Guide Design Systems and Design Technology as a center of excellence for front-end product quality, interaction patterns, accessibility, implementation standards, and coherence across product experiences.

• Develop and refine reusable product patterns that enhance core Dropbox experiences, such as navigation, creation flows, sharing, permissions, collaboration, onboarding, search, content activation, notifications, settings, admin workflows, and AI-assisted experiences.

• Transition the team from reactive patternization to proactive product leadership, identifying horizontal product needs early and shaping scalable solutions across multiple Dropbox surfaces and teams.

• Manage the complete lifecycle of shared patterns and components, covering discovery, definition, design, prototyping, engineering collaboration, adoption, measurement, maintenance, governance, and deprecation.

• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Brand, Marketing, and Design leadership to align on high-impact horizontal opportunities and ensure that shared systems effectively support product strategy.

• Elevate the craft and quality standards across Dropbox by enhancing interaction design, visual quality, information architecture, accessibility, motion, content patterns, implementation fidelity, and front-end consistency.

• Create an operating model that promotes adoption as an attractive option rather than a requirement, encouraging product teams to view the system as a means to accelerate progress, improve quality, and minimize duplicated efforts.

• Lead and mentor a team of designers, design technologists, and systems specialists, fostering clear ownership, robust critique practices, high standards, and a culture of pragmatic systems thinking.

• Collaborate with engineering leadership to strengthen the relationship between design systems, code, product infrastructure, and front-end delivery, ensuring design intent is translated into high-quality implementation.

• Establish robust governance, measurement, and contribution models that facilitate the continuous evolution of the system while maintaining quality, coherence, and accountability.

• Prepare Dropbox for AI-native product experiences by defining systems capable of encoding design knowledge, guiding product decisions, and supporting more adaptive, contextual, and intelligent experiences over time.

⛳️ Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in product design, design systems, design technology, or front-end roles, with substantial experience leading complex systems or platform initiatives at scale.

• 5+ years of experience in people management, demonstrating a strong track record of leading senior designers, managers, design technologists, or multidisciplinary systems teams.

• Extensive experience in building, scaling, or transforming design systems for complex multi-product organizations.

• Strong product judgment and the capacity to connect systems work directly to customer value, product strategy, execution speed, and business impact.

• Exceptional systems thinking, with the ability to identify patterns across teams, products, platforms, and workflows, and convert those patterns into reusable experience infrastructure.

• High standards in craft across interaction design, information architecture, visual design, accessibility, prototyping, content patterns, motion, and implementation quality.

• Proven ability to influence senior cross-functional partners, create alignment in ambiguous problem spaces, and enhance horizontal product quality without relying solely on mandates.

• Strong technical fluency and comfort collaborating with front-end engineering teams on component architecture, implementation standards, platform constraints, quality control, and system adoption.

• Experience in defining governance models, contribution models, quality standards, documentation practices, and lifecycle processes for shared product systems.

• A clear perspective on the future of design systems, including the impact of AI, design technology, design infrastructure, and reusable product logic on team design and building processes.

• A collaborative, low-ego leadership style, with a history of developing talent, raising standards, enhancing critique, and enabling teams to produce superior work than they could independently.

• A portfolio or body of work showcasing strong design leadership, systems strategy, product impact, organizational influence, and excellent aesthetic judgment.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance

• 401(k) matching

• Flexible work hours

• Paid time off

• Remote work options