Dir, Product Design

Dir, Product Design

Location:

Austin, TX, United States

Category:
Product

Job

Join us on our mission to empower more people to find their way home by breaking barriers to entry, making the right connections, and building confidence through expert guidance.

Are you a design systems expert with a strategic, consumer-first mindset? Are you looking to be the driving force in creating world‑class experiences that help people find and enjoy a home of their own — not just executing a roadmap, but helping shape it? If you want to expand your professional goals at Avail by ®, this is the role for you!

This role will immerse themselves in the market and our industry, partnering closely with senior leaders in Product and Engineering to define, create, and execute our bold vision for transforming the real estate industry — not simply implement a strategy set by others. You will be responsible for design decisions and patterns for multiple products and ensuring the adoption thereof by product designers who work in those areas.

You’ll also build on the design system foundation by enhancing toolchain connections between design files and code, promoting education and advocacy, and collaborating closely with cross‑functional teams across all platforms. A team of designers will report to this role, and you will closely partner with a sibling engineering team. You will also collaborate with cross functional leaders on team capacity and skills.

And work with other design leaders to drive the strategy and execution of Design Ops tools and processes to create a more scalable and efficient design practice. This role reports to the Head of Avail.

• Own the Avail design system. Define and evolve the components, patterns, and tokens powering Avail’s Renter, Landlord, and Public surfaces, and drive their adoption across the design team.

• Bring a consumer funnel mindset. Apply design thought leadership across full B2C workflows (or B2B workflows operating at consumer scale/complexity) — acquisition through conversion through retention — so the design system serves real user journeys and business outcomes, not just visual and component consistency.

• Drive product discovery, then raise the bar on execution. Identify consumer pain points and market opportunities yourself — through research, data, and direct engagement with renters and landlords — rather than working solely from a roadmap handed to you. Set the quality standard for end‑to‑end product design across Avail, reviewing and guiding feature work so the experience stays cohesive as the product grows.

• Make accessibility the default. Build accessible patterns and tokens into the system itself, and grow the team’s fluency so a11y is designed in from the start rather than retrofitted.

• Champion usability. Bring rigor to usability best practices across the system and key workflows, and scope and run usability testing where it’s warranted — recognizing not every product or workflow justifies a formal study.

• Keep design and code in lockstep. Partner with your engineering counterpart to align components across design and code, and advance a connected toolchain between Figma and the codebase.

• Document so the system scales. Maintain clear, accessible documentation and contribution processes for every component, so designers and engineers can move without you in the room.

• Make the case for the system. Translate the value of design systems and accessibility into language Product, Engineering, and executive partners care about, grounded in business and quality metrics.

• Shape strategy, then plan a roadmap that ships. Immerse yourself in the market and our industry, and partner with cross‑functional peers to define and navigate Avail’s long‑term product strategy…