Director Advanced Design

The Director of Advanced Design leads McLaren’s Advanced Product Design team and is responsible for developing visionary, strategically aligned design concepts that anticipate future product opportunities and reinforce McLaren’s brand direction.

The role acts as a key link between future product planning, brand interpretation, and advanced engineering, ensuring that design thinking is informed by business strategy, technical opportunity,and customer desirability. The Director of Advanced Design digests the brand, translates long-term product intent into tangible creative direction, and helps define what McLaren should become in future product cycles. This role requires a balance of creative leadership, strategic insight, and technical understanding.

The Director will ensure that advanced design work is not only visually compelling, but also relevant, feasible, and aligned to McLaren’s future portfolio, performance ambitions, and innovation agenda.

• Lead the Advanced Product Design team in creating future-focused design proposals that support McLaren’s long-term product vision.
• Define and communicate a clear design direction that reflects brand values, market opportunity, and technology progression.
• Translate strategic objectives into compelling design thinking and development themes.
• Provide strong creative and strategic guidance across all advanced design activities.

• Work closely with future product planning teams to align advanced design exploration with portfolio strategy and timing.
• Contribute design insight to long-range product roadmaps, programme definition, and opportunity identification.
• Identify and evaluate future design directions that support the evolution of McLaren’s product line.
• Ensure design work contributes meaningfully to business and product strategy.

• Interpret and digest McLaren’s brand values, heritage, and future ambition into advanced design output.
• Ensure concepts are authentic to McLaren and consistent with the brand’s performance-led identity.
• Support the development of design language that strengthens brand differentiation and desirability.
• Maintain a clear understanding of how design can express the brand in future products and market segments.

• Build strong links with advanced engineering teams to ensure design concepts are technically credible and development-ready.
• Collaborate on feasibility, packaging, architecture, materials, surfacing, and innovation opportunities.
• Support the integration of engineering intelligence into early-stage design exploration.
• Help identify where advanced design can influence technical direction and unlock new possibilities.

• Lead, develop, and inspire a high-performing Advanced Product Design team.
• Set clear expectations, priorities, and standards for creativity, quality, and delivery.
• Provide coaching, feedback, and professional development support to team members.
• Foster a collaborative, ambitious, and accountable team environment.

• Oversee the creation of advanced design concepts, sketches, renderings, models, and

• Ensure concepts are original, strategically relevant, and consistent with McLaren’s future

• Champion experimentation and innovation in form language, proportion, customer

• Drive strong design narratives that communicate direction clearly to senior stakeholders.

Strong integration of brand, future product planning, and advanced engineering inputs.

• Present design thinking and proposals confidently to the Chief Design Officer and other senior stakeholders.
• Influence cross-functional stakeholders through clear storytelling, evidence-based design…