Lead Experience Designer

Join Thoughtworks at the beginning of our next chapter in the Middle East. KSA and the UAE are strategic growth markets for us, fueled by ambitious national agendas around AI, digital government, data, and economic transformation, such as Vision 2030. We are looking for an experienced Lead Experience Designer to join our fast-growing local team in Riyadh.

As a Lead Experience Designer, you will be the creative force driving the definition and delivery of AI-powered products and experiences. Operating within small, fast-paced, multidisciplinary pods - collaborating shoulder-to-shoulder with Product Managers, Data/AI Specialists, and forward deployed engineers - you will lead end-to-end design from initial concept through to shipped products.

This role combines hands-on interaction design, strategic client advisory, and foundational practice-building. You will shape how agentic AI systems behave, look, and feel while helping establish and scale local design capabilities and client relationships.

• End-to-End Design Ownership: Lead experience design across all engagement phases. Facilitate discovery workshops, map complex user journeys, create mid-to-high fidelity concept visualisations, and build interactive prototypes. Design in parallel with engineering, testing with working prototypes rather than static handoffs.
• AI-Native & Agentic UX: Shape conversational, multi-modal, and autonomous agent flows. Apply core principles of trust, transparency, and user control - surfacing AI reasoning appropriately, managing uncertainty, and setting responsible AI guardrails.
• AI-Accelerated Practice: Leverage AI tools and platforms (such as Figma, UX Pilot, Bolt, Murai, Maze, and LLM research tools) to collapse ideation cycles and accelerate research without compromising craft or usability.
• Lean User Research & Testing: Conduct lightweight generative and evaluative research that matches rapid sprint cycles. Champion accessibility, inclusive design, and continuous validation from day one.
• Design Systems & Scalability: Build, evolve, and govern design systems and component libraries in close partnership with engineering to drive pod velocity and visual consistency.
• Consultative Leadership & Advisory: Act as a trusted advisor to client executives, partnering with them to shape user experiences for ambitious AI-native products, data platforms, and complex digital transformations. Apply a consultative approach in pre-sales, helping shape engagements, creating proposals, and establishing our trusted footprint in the region.
• Practice Building & Culture: Play a pivotal role in building our local Experience Design capability, influencing our multidisciplinary teams, establishing design culture, and shaping early client relationships in the Middle East.

• 7+ years of experience in product design with a portfolio demonstrating exceptional visual design quality, strong UX reasoning, fast concept-to-prototype capability, and end-to-end ownership of shipped digital products.
• Demonstrated track record of leading design on large-scale programs, 0-1 product launches and navigating senior stakeholder groups.
• Expertise in user research, journey mapping, wire framing, and rapid prototyping, utilising lean approaches to validate desirability, viability, and feasibility.
• Fluency in designing for AI and data-driven products
  -comfortable exploring how AI can enhance the user experience and utilising AI-enabled design tools in your daily workflow.
• Experience bringing a human-centered design and innovation mindset into organizations at scale, particularly in environments undergoing rapid economic or digital transformation.
• Strong grounding in accessibility, inclusive design, and responsive/adaptive design…