Lead, Design Architect - Customer Experience

Company Overview

Invitation Homes owns and operates homes in great neighborhoods across 16 top U.S. markets. We innovate with smart home technology, an industry‑leading maintenance app, and lifestyle‑enhancing services that make leasing easier than owning. Our market teams—Leasing, Property Management, and Rehab, Turns & Maintenance—work together to deliver excellent resident experiences and maintain high‑quality homes.

The Lead, Design Architect - Customer Experience is the design authority and voice for Invitation Homes’ customer‑facing digital experience. This purpose‑built, lead‑level role centralizes design, measurement, and improvement of the digital tools and workflows our customers use every day. Reporting to the Sr. Director of DXD, the architect drives meaningful change with enterprise visibility and influence and blends experience ownership, design architecture, research, and data fluency.

Customer Experience Design Authority

• Serve as the design authority and experience owner for all customer‑facing digital experiences.
• Lead design and experience strategy across key platforms (Website, Mobile App, Search, Application, Portal, etc.) and co‑own with the Sr. Director of DXD.
• Refine experience standards, interaction patterns, and design principles for customer workflows.
• Embed experience design thinking into Center of Excellence workflows, prioritization, and decision‑making.

Customer/XO/MXG Engagement & Insight Generation

• Build strong relationships with customer experts (Customer Experience, Experience Owners, Product/Technology) to identify friction points and translate them into prioritized design and tooling opportunities.
• Represent the customer perspective in cross‑functional planning, roadmap reviews, and strategy sessions.
• Document and share insights to build lasting institutional knowledge.

Analytics, Feedback Loops & Adoption Tracking

• Track feature adoption and assess alignment with intended experience outcomes.
• Conduct ongoing system usability assessments with associates.
• Establish and maintain feedback mechanisms between customers and DXD/product/technology teams.
• Report on experience performance, surfacing gaps, wins, and opportunities.
• Work with XOs to elevate opportunities to close visibility gaps in customer experience data.
• Establish a forward‑looking view of customer experience priorities.

AI‑Assisted Design, Vibe Coding & Rapid Prototyping

• Leverage vibe coding and AI‑assisted design to rapidly translate insights into testable concepts.
• Prototype alternative workflows, tool interactions, and experience improvements across customer platforms.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI design tooling that accelerates design and innovation.

Experimentation & Design‑Led Testing

• Partner with the Director of Experimentation to co‑develop insight‑driven hypotheses.
• Lead design of experience experiments for customer‑facing tools, from concept through analysis.
• Design with testability in mind—structuring variants, workflows, and interactions to drive measurable outcomes.
• Embrace A/B testing and experimentation as standard practice in validating customer experience changes.

Early Discovery & UX Research Partnership

• Partner with UX Research early in discovery to co‑design research approaches, translate insights into real‑time design direction, and validate ideas before prototyping or experimentation.
• Champion continuous discovery as an ongoing discipline.

Change Management for Experience Improvements

• Support change management for customer experience improvements.
• Design adoption and communication strategies for new tools, processes, and improvements.
• Partner with Operations, HR, and Training to ensure effective rollout and readiness.
• Monitor and communicate adoption and sentiment.

Backlog Advocacy & Cross‑Functional Influence

• Advocate for customer needs in product and technology prioritization decisions.
• Act as the liaison between CX associates and product/technology partners.
• Inform and educate cross‑functional stakeholders to align on customer experience improvements.
• Provide experience‑driven input to inform roadmap planning for customer‑facing products.

Required

• 5+ years of…