This role leads a team of product and UX designers supporting developer experience, design systems, and AI-enabled design tooling across PayPal. It sits within the design portfolio, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Developer Relations, Documentation, Research and Accessibility teams.
What you'll do
- Establish overall business or technical strategy for user experience initiatives
- Negotiate with and influence decision-making reaching the senior executive level
- Identify and resolve unique situations of substantial significance in UI or interaction design
- Allocate resources and apply creativity to enhance UX across digital and physical products
- Lead development of UX strategies that resonate with target audiences
- Support and mentor less-experienced roles through example and day-to-day learning
- Lead, coach, and develop a team of product and UX designers
- Set clear expectations, give feedback, support career growth, address performance concerns
- Recruit and retain strong designers, build an inclusive team environment
- Translate portfolio goals into clear design priorities for the team
- Balance near-term delivery needs with longer-term system improvements
- Assign work based on business priorities, designer strengths, and capacity
- Identify staffing or skill gaps and recommend practical changes
- Maintain hands-on design knowledge and contribute directly to selected work
- Lead design reviews and strengthen critique practices
- Help designers use research, data, and constraints to make sound decisions
- Guide design of developer dashboards, documentation experiences, and related tools
- Advise teams on usability of APIs, SDKs, documentation, and MCP-based tools
- Contribute to design-system strategy, standards, and component architecture
- Coach designers and partner teams that use or contribute to the design system
- Help teams resolve system-level design problems and apply shared patterns
- Improve approved AI-assisted design workflows and design tooling
- Support small experiments, human review, and practical measures of results
- Build or guide prototypes and lightweight internal tools
- Research the needs of developers and other internal users
- Identify friction in tools, documentation, handoffs, and implementation workflows
- Define and track meaningful outcomes for the team's work
- Build effective partnerships across Product, Engineering, Developer Relations, and other teams
- Communicate with senior leaders and resolve disagreements through evidence and judgment
What we're looking for
- 10+ years relevant experience and a bachelor's degree, or equivalent combination
- 2 years of experience leading others
Nice to have
- 10+ years in product design, UX design, interaction design, or related field
- 5+ years directly managing product or UX designers
- Experience with hiring, coaching, performance management, career development, team health, retention
- Portfolio showing storytelling, systems thinking, design judgment, and leadership results
- Strong skills in interaction design, prototyping, information architecture, design critique
- Experience leading design for complex digital products connecting user and business needs
- Working knowledge of design-system architecture, component models, semantic tokens, accessibility
- Experience using qualitative and quantitative evidence to guide design decisions
- Ability to work across organisational boundaries and influence without direct authority
- Clear written, verbal, and visual communication skills
- Experience designing developer-facing products, platforms, dashboards, or internal tools
- Experience helping build, govern, scale, or increase adoption of a design system
- Experience evaluating or improving AI-assisted design or development workflows
- Ability to use code or low-code tools to build functional prototypes
- Experience improving usability of APIs, SDKs, documentation, or MCP-based tools
- Experience applying WCAG and inclusive-design practices to complex systems
- Experience with global products, regulated environments, or strong security and privacy controls
- Experience defining and using measures for developer experience or design-system adoption
Good to know
- Hybrid work model: 3 days in office, 2 days office or home