VP, User Experience

Later is seeking a Vice President, User Experience to lead design across its product portfolio, spanning Later Influence, Later Social, and Mavely. The successful candidate will build and lead a team of 5-6 UX designers, partnering closely with product managers and an engineering organization of 100+ developers to ship experiences that are cohesive, intuitive, and scalable across its lines of business.

Responsibilities:

• 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.