Design Director

Location:

Abu Dhabi, UAE (onsite). Type:
Full-time. Relocation supported.

ai71 builds enterprise-grade AI for the organisations that underpin the real economy : governments, banks, and large enterprises. We’re rooted in the Middle East and Africa, where the demands on us are at their highest: sovereignty, on-prem, multi-lingual, and real regulatory weight. Those same demands are arriving everywhere, and what holds up here travels
. Our work is grounded in a commitment to deploying AI securely, responsibly, and at scale.

Our flagship product is Ask , our agentic AI platform. It puts AI agents to work on an organisation’s own knowledge, systems, and workflows: agents that reason through complexity, draw on the organisation’s collective knowledge, and complete real work rather than just answer questions
. Ask is infrastructure agnostic and model agnostic , so it runs inside a customer’s existing stack and security perimeter, or in sovereign clouds, instead of forcing them onto ours. Today it’s deployed across knowledge-heavy functions (legal, finance, HR, procurement) in some of the most regulated environments in the world : government entities, financial institutions, and industrial groups, primarily in the UAE and North Africa.

We build Ask in squads : roughly a PM, three or four engineers, and a designer, each owning a slice of the product end-to-end and shipping it. Our design team is small today (two full-time designers and two contractors), with a design system that already carries real weight in how we ship.

What the team needs now is a leader, and this is a player-coach role, in that order. You’ll design every week, own surfaces yourself, and set the bar with your own work. Around that, you’ll give the team structure, ways of working, and a coach worth following.

AI is rewriting what the job of a designer is , and we want the person leading design here to be pushing that boundary personally: prototyping in working code, exploring ten directions where two used to be affordable, and rebuilding how the team works around what the tools now make possible.

Your mandate runs wider than product design. How ai71 looks to the world (the brand, the website, the feel of everything we put in front of a buyer) belongs to you too.

Design, weekly. You’ll own surfaces of Ask yourself, ship them, and sit in the work side by side with the team. Your portfolio stays live here. If a month passes without you making something, the role has drifted.

Raise the craft. This is a craft mandate, pursued through example and coaching rather than a review gate. You’ll set what excellent looks like on the platform’s core surfaces, run crits people show up for, and make each designer measurably better at the details.

Push what design becomes with AI. We expect our Design Director to be genuinely dangerous with an AI coding agent , whichever one you like, because that’s how this team ships. You’ll make working-code prototypes the team’s default artefact, multiply how many directions get explored before a call is made, and keep adapting how the team works as the tools change under everyone’s feet.

Give the team structure. Ways of working, clear ownership, careers that grow without forcing anyone into management. The design system deserves protected ownership so it accelerates every squad instead of competing for its owner’s hours.

Own how ai71 looks to the world. You’ll hire and manage a brand designer, and partner with Product Marketing (who own the story) and Demand (who take it to market) so that the product, the website, and the brand feel like one company.

Coach seniors without capping them. Part of the team is very senior and wants to stay hands‑on. Your job is to make them better…