Head of Design (North America/Europe - Remote)

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: Head of Design (North America/Europe - Remote)

Company: Hospitable

Location: United Kingdom (Remote)

Job Type: FULL_TIME

Category: Design Leadership / Product Design

Date Posted: 2026-08-06T09:36:39.751

Experience Level: 5-10 Years

Remote Status: Remote Solely

🚀 Role Summary

• Spearhead the design vision, standards, and team for a product-led SaaS company, ensuring an exceptional user experience for short-term rental hosts.

• Drive end-to-end design ownership from discovery and research through to the delivery of intuitive and elegant product features.

• Build and lead a lean, AI-leveraged product design team, setting the bar for quality and fostering a culture of high expectations and direct feedback.

• Act as a player-coach, maintaining hands-on design work while guiding and mentoring other designers to produce their best work.

📝 Enhancement Note: The role emphasizes a "player-coach" model, indicating a need for a leader who is deeply involved in the hands-on design process rather than solely managing a team. This is a critical distinction for candidates to understand, as it requires a blend of strategic leadership and individual contribution. The focus on "AI-leveraged" design suggests an expectation for candidates to be proficient with and advocate for the integration of AI tools within the design workflow to enhance efficiency and output in a lean environment.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Define and champion the overarching design vision for the Hospitable platform, ensuring alignment with the company's long-term strategic objectives.

• Own and elevate the quality bar for the entire product interface, making every user interaction intuitive, visually elegant, and a positive experience.

• Lead the design for high-stakes projects, taking responsibility for the full design lifecycle including discovery, user research, prototyping, visual design, and interaction design.

• Develop, maintain, and evolve the design language, style guide, and component library to ensure platform coherence and reduce complexity as the product and team scale.

• Proactively identify and eliminate design inconsistencies to prevent compounding issues.

• Build, develop, and lead a deliberately lean product design team, leveraging AI tools to maximize efficiency and output.

• Establish the operational framework for how design functions within the company, ensuring effective processes and quality control.

• Foster a culture of continuous improvement by providing direct feedback and setting high expectations for team members, enabling them to achieve their career-best work.

• Collaborate as an equal partner with Product and Engineering leadership to influence product strategy and roadmap decisions, not just execute on visual design.

• Utilize user research, product analytics, experimentation, and customer feedback to inform design decisions and demonstrate the impact of design initiatives.

📝 Enhancement Note: The core responsibilities highlight a dual focus on strategic leadership and hands-on execution. The emphasis on "reducing complexity" and "killing inconsistency" points to a need for a candidate with a strong understanding of scalable design systems and process optimization within a SaaS context. The explicit mention of "AI-leveraged" design suggests that candidates should be prepared to discuss how they would integrate AI into their team's workflow to achieve greater efficiency and innovation.

🎓 Skills & Qualifications

Education: A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field is preferred, though equivalent practical experience will be strongly considered.

Experience: A minimum of 5-10 years of progressive experience in product design, with at least 3 years in a leadership capacity, ideally within a product-led SaaS environment.

Required Skills:

• Proven track record of setting and elevating design quality standards at a product-led SaaS company within the last 5 years.

• Demonstrated ability to lead and raise the standard of designers through direct feedback, hiring, and high expectations.

• Extensive experience in end-to-end design ownership, from discovery and user research through to shipped features, with a strong emphasis on demonstrating the impact of design work.

• Hands-on design proficiency, with a commitment to staying involved in the craft and leading by example, rather than moving to pure management.

• Exceptional skills in user research, problem definition, and translating insights into effective design solutions.

• Strong product thinking capabilities, able to contribute significantly to product strategy and roadmap discussions as an equal to Product and Engineering leadership.

• High levels of agency, ownership, and comfort operating effectively in a lean, remote, and low-bureaucracy environment.

• Proficiency in modern design tools, specifically Whimsical for mockups and Figma for design execution.

• Experience leveraging AI tooling to enhance design processes and team productivity. Preferred Skills:

• Domain experience in short-term rentals, travel, hospitality, or proptech.

• Experience building and scaling design systems and component libraries.

• Familiarity with A/B testing and data analysis to validate design decisions.

• Experience working within a distributed, remote-first company culture.

• Strong understanding of agile development methodologies and cross-functional team collaboration.

📝 Enhancement Note: The experience requirements emphasize leadership within a "product-led SaaS company" and a "player-coach" model, suggesting a need for candidates who have successfully driven design strategy and execution in environments focused on user growth and retention through product experience. The explicit mention of "hands-on" experience in the last 3 years is a key differentiator.

📊 Process & Systems Portfolio Requirements

Portfolio Essentials:

• Demonstrate end-to-end ownership of significant design projects, showcasing your ability to drive impact from initial concept to deployed features.

• Include detailed case studies that articulate the problem statement, your research and discovery process, design rationale, and quantifiable outcomes.

• Showcase your experience in establishing and maintaining design systems, style guides, and component libraries, highlighting their impact on consistency and efficiency.

• Present examples of your leadership in raising design quality and mentoring other designers, ideally with feedback or recognition from peers or direct reports.

• Illustrate your proficiency with Figma and Whimsical, demonstrating complex design solutions and effective prototyping. Process Documentation:

• Provide examples of how you have structured design processes within