Head of Design

Head Of Design

Are you a senior design leader who loves complex systems and wants to stay close to the craft whilst reporting to supportive, empathetic leaders? This is for you.

Backlight is a global media technology company shaping the future of how creative teams produce, manage, and distribute content. Through its portfolio of products—including Iconik, Ftrack, Celtx, Zype, and Wildmoka—Backlight empowers creators, studios, and broadcasters such as NBC and BBC to bring stories to life from concept to screen. Backlight has brought together some of the most respected creative tools in the industry into one ecosystem serving the full media lifecycle.

We are hiring a Head of Design to lead design across a core part of Backlight's product portfolio and help shape the next phase of growth. This is a hands-on player-coach role. You will:

• Shape the product & platform strategy, as a core contributor to the product and technology leadership team
• Set the design vision and raise the quality bar
• Partner deeply with product and engineering
• Scale a small senior team responsibly
• Stay close enough to the work to influence key flows and experience decisions

Team & environment:

• Current team: 2 highly experienced designers (Stockholm-based), with plans to grow.
• Engineering presence: strong development team in Sophia Antipolis (France)
• Culture: high output, high ownership, fast-moving

We are looking for someone who thrives in environments where they must:

• Make decisions with imperfect information
• Bring structure without slowing momentum
• Translate complexity into clarity

This is not a heavily layered design org. It is a tight, high-trust group that needs leadership to scale.

What you'll do:

Design leadership & strategy:

• Define and evolve the design direction for Iconik and Wildmoka
• Align design execution with product strategy and engineering capability
• Shape how Iconik and Wildmoka expands into new customer segments and use cases
• Drive cross-functional collaboration across "tribes" as the organization grows

Player-coach craft:

• Maintain a high craft bar in complex B2B workflows
• Simplify powerful systems without dumbing them down
• Contribute directly to critical UX, interaction, and structural design work

Team & operating model:

• Coach and develop a small, senior design team
• Introduce scalable rituals, prioritization clarity, and feedback loops
• Partner closely with senior leadership across Backlight to ensure high-quality implementation

What we're looking for:

Essential:

• Senior product design leadership experience in B2B SaaS environments
• Experience working on complex, systems-driven products (workflow tools, systems of record, platforms)
• Ability to operate as a player-coach
• Comfort leading in scrappy, under-documented, high-ambiguity environments
• Comfortable working in a modern, iterative product environment (prototyping, testing, continuous refinement)
• Strong cross-functional collaboration with product and engineering

Strong plus:

• Exposure to high-craft, opinionated tools (e.g. Linear, Attio, etc.)
• Familiarity with video, media, or creative workflows (industry experience not required, but affinity helps)
• Experience scaling small teams through inflection points

Location & travel:

Preferred locations:

Travel expectations depend on base location but may include periodic travel between Stockholm and the South of France.