Director UI/UX

We are looking for a Director of UI/UX for our travel industry client based in Dallas. In this role you will lead a user-obsessed, high-velocity practice that mentors daily across UI/UX and QA, modernizes our application experiences end-to-end, and infuses responsible AI into the user journey. This is a sleeves-up leadership role: part design exec, part product partner, part quality coach.

Job Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership

• Own the UI/UX strategy across web and mobile, aligned with business outcomes and engineering capacity.
• Partner with Product, Eng, and BizOps to pick fewer, bigger bets and design for measurable user value.
• Champion a user-first + quality-first culture that treats UX and QA as two sides of the same coin.

Team Management & Mentorship

• Lead and grow designers, researchers, and front-end collaborators; mentor QA analysts/engineers on UX quality practices.
• Run daily office hours, weekly critiques, and design-QA pairing to level up the craft.
• Define and track UX/QA KPIs (STTS/NPS, escape defect rate for UX bugs, a11y/perf budgets, adoption of DS components).

Design Execution & Oversight

• Drive discovery, concept, prototype, usability testing, spec implementation.
• Own Design System (tokens, components, patterns, content guidelines) with governance and contribution model.
• Ensure accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA), internationalization readiness, responsive layouts, and performance budgets are non-negotiable.

User Research & Data

• Blend qual and quant: interviews, usability studies, analytics funnels, session replays, heatmaps, and task-level KPIs.
• Translate insights into clear bets and trade-offs; instrument outcomes before shipping.

Cross-Functional Delivery

• Partner with engineering to ensure designs are feasible, resilient, and testable; own handoff quality (redlines, states, edge cases).
• Co-write UX acceptance criteria; embed checks into CI/CD (visual diff, a11y, performance).
• Communicate strategy and results crisply to executives and customers.

AI in the User Experience

• Identify high-value AI augmentation points (summarization, routing, predictive forms, contextual help, personalization).
• Define prompting patterns, evaluation metrics, and human-in-the-loop safeguards; partner with data/ML for offline eval + AB tests.
• Establish responsible AI guardrails: bias checks, explainability level appropriate to context, and opt-out/consent patterns.

QA Collaboration & Modernization

• Elevate QA from "after-the-fact testing" to design-time quality: testable specs, happy/sad paths, edge cases.
• Implement visual regression and a11y checks (e.g., Chromatic/Applitools; AXE) and performance checks (Lighthouse) as gates.
• Drive modernization of legacy flows: information architecture, progressive disclosure, state management, design tokens, and componentization for speed and consistency.

Job Qualifications

• 8+ years in Product Design/UI/UX with 3-5+ years leading multi-disciplinary teams.
• Portfolio that shows systems thinking, measurable impact, and accessible, performant design at scale.
• Hands-on with Figma (tokens, variants, auto-layout), Storybook, and prototyping tools.
• Working knowledge of front-end tech (HTML/CSS/JS/React) and how it affects feasibility/performance.
• Proven collaboration with QA: writing UX acceptance criteria, defining quality bars, partnering on automation.
• Fluency with research methods and product analytics.

• Preferred Qualifications
• Ran or scaled a DesignOps function and a mature design system.
• Experience in SaaS/enterprise products with complex workflows.
• Exposure to AI-powered UX (LLM, RAG, recommendations) and evaluation methods.
• Executive-level communication; crisp storytelling and stakeholder management.
• Soft Skills
• Bias for outcomes over artifacts; pragmatic visionary.
• Clear, candid communicator who can coach, challenge, and unblock.
• High empathy for users and teammates; resilient under ambiguity.