Description
Pfizer is seeking a Director-level design leader to own the consistency of its AI-first design system across human and agent surfaces. The successful candidate will bring exceptional executive presence, narrative storytelling ability, and political acumen, while remaining deeply hands-on and invested in growing the people on their team.
Job Summary: 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.
Responsibilities:
- Own, extend, and evolve Pfizer's AI-first design system across human and agent surfaces
- Deliver design standards as code: tokens, patterns, and components shipped into the engineering build pipeline
- Track adoption in code (pattern usage, override rate, exception requests) and retire patterns the data shows are not working
- Connect design outcomes to measurable KPIs: adoption, task success, trust, time-to-resolution, and first-pass compliance
- Lead by example and innovation: set the design bar by shipping work in new AI tools first
- Hands-on design delivery: independently own end-to-end design execution for high-impact, ambiguous initiatives
- Agentic and conversational design authority: act as the design authority for Agentic AI experiences
- Assistant behavior design: define assistant behaviors such as tone and voice, refusal patterns, transparency cues, and explainability
- LLM product partnership: partner closely with AI, Data, Product, and Engineering teams to co-own LLM-enabled products
- 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
- Product vision and roadmap: support product vision and roadmap prioritization
- Team building and talent lifecycle: build, lead, and grow a high-performing team of experience designers
- Budget and resourcing: own the team's operating budget and staffing across platforms and initiatives
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree with at least 8 years of progressive experience in Experience Design, UX, or Product Design
- 5+ years of direct people management experience
- Working fluency with front-end development principles, APIs, and design-token pipelines
- Experience owning and evolving design systems and AI-first interaction patterns at scale
- Deep expertise in AI-driven experience design, including hands-on experience designing Agentic AI workflows and Conversational UX
- Advanced understanding of how AI systems behave, communicate, and build trust
- Exceptional design judgment and craft excellence
- Outstanding executive communication and storytelling skills
- Expertise in accessibility and inclusive design
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- A robust portfolio demonstrating system-level thinking, AI-powered experiences, and rapid prototyping approaches