Director of Product Design

Job Summary

As Director of Product Design, you will shape and champion the vision for user experiences across OpenEye’s products, ensuring every interaction is rooted in deep customer understanding and validated through rigorous research. You will elevate and lead our user research and design capabilities, making user insight a critical driver of product decisions.

Your work will span from envisioning future user experiences, particularly around AI-driven interfaces and emerging technologies, to building the research practices, design systems, and team capabilities that enable us to deliver exceptional usability at scale. You will be both a visionary who anticipates how users will interact with intelligent systems and a rigorous practitioner who ensures solutions are validated through direct user engagement.

This role requires a seasoned UX leader who has built research practices from the ground up, who influences product direction through deep user understanding, and who inspires teams to solve meaningful problems rather than simply ship features.

Role and Responsibilities

• Define and champion the long-term vision for user experience at OpenEye, anticipating how customers will interact with emerging technologies like AI-driven interfaces and intelligent systems
• Build, lead, and scale the user research practice across the organization, establishing methodologies and standards while conducting discovery interviews, usability testing, and ongoing customer engagement to validate assumptions and uncover unmet needs
• Influence product strategy and roadmap by translating research findings into actionable recommendations that shape what we build and why
• Establish and evolve OpenEye's design system and standards for consistency, scalability, usability, and accessibility across all product experiences
• Lead UX strategy for high-impact initiatives, ensuring solutions are grounded in user-centered design principles and deliver measurable improvements in usability
• Oversee complex UX projects from early discovery through launch, ensuring designs meet the highest standards of usability, accessibility, and polish
• Mentor and develop Product Designers, building their capabilities in user research, interaction design, and usability best practices
• Coach cross-functional teams in user-centered design thinking and research-driven decision making
• Partner with Product Management, Engineering, and Quality to advocate for user needs while balancing business objectives and technical feasibility
• Ensure feedback from usability testing and user engagement is systematically integrated into design iterations and post-launch improvements
• Stay ahead of UX trends, interaction paradigms, and emerging interface technologies to keep OpenEye at the forefront of user experience excellence
• Other duties as assigned

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, or a related field
• 8-10+ years of professional experience in UX/product design, including demonstrated leadership roles
• Proven track record of building or scaling user research practices, including study design, methodology selection, usability testing, and synthesis of findings into actionable insights
• Experience leading end-to-end UX design for complex software applications from research through delivery
• Strong portfolio demonstrating user-centered design thinking, usability improvements, and measurable impact on user experience
• Evidence of influencing product strategy and priorities through user research and UX advocacy
• Deep understanding of user-centered design methodologies, usability principles, interaction design patterns, and WCAG accessibility standards
• Exceptional ability to articulate user needs and design rationale to influence stakeholders at all levels, including executive leadership
• Experience mentoring designers and building design capabilities within teams
• Proficiency with modern design and prototyping tools such as Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience creating, maintaining, and scaling design systems for enterprise software or SaaS products
• Demonstrated expertise in designing AI-driven experiences, conversational interfaces, or intelligent systems
• Experience working in IP video, physical security, business intelligence, IoT, or related technical domains
• Track record of organizational change management
• Strong ability to balance user needs, business goals, and technical constraints while keeping the user's perspective central
• Familiarity with modern software engineering practices and how UX integrates into development workflows