Head of Design

What you'll do

Own the quality bar

• Set a clear, consistent quality bar that the team can orient around and build toward, so great work becomes the natural output of how we design together.
• Build review processes and critique rituals that give the team a shared language for quality and the confidence to make strong craft decisions together.
• Evolve the design system and QA practices so the bar rises as the team grows.
• Dig into one of the most genuinely interesting UX challenges in the space: n8n has historically had a steep learning curve for new users. Your job is to lower that floor without losing the power that experienced builders love.

Drive design's strategic influence

• Shape product strategy, not just respond to it. Bring design thinking into roadmap conversations and help surface user problems before they become someone else's brief.
• Help lead n8n's expansion toward a broader, less technical audience, a deliberate and exciting strategic shift that design should be leading.
• Build the kind of relationships with Product, Engineering, and leadership where design is a genuine thought partner at every stage.

Build and grow the team

• Lead a team of around 14 designers today: 2 Design Leads each working with ~6 ICs, plus Design Engineering and UX Research (with more hires ahead).
• Shape the team structure, career framework, and progression paths so people know where they stand and where they're going.
• Create a culture of high standards and honest feedback, where people feel supported to do their best work and have a clear sense of what great looks like.
• Own hiring and headcount planning for the department, and help us grow without losing what makes the team good.

Build research into how we make decisions

• Establish a pragmatic, continuous research practice from the ground up. We're making our first dedicated UX research hires, so there's real room to shape this.
• Make customer insight, product data, and community feedback a live input to product decisions, so teams are building from evidence at every step.
• Connect research to the decisions that matter most: activation, adoption, retention, and helping new users find their way into n8n with confidence.

Help the team work in new ways

• Champion practical AI adoption inside the design org, from prototyping and research synthesis to design QA and workflow efficiency.
• Help the team stay curious and current as the tools, patterns, and expectations around AI products continue to evolve fast.
• Model the kind of working style you want to see: thoughtful, adaptive, and genuinely excited about what's changing.

Requirements

Must-haves

• Product design leadership: You have managed managers, coached senior designers, and built design teams that improve both craft and business outcomes, including making hard performance calls when needed.
• Complex product systems experience: You have led design across complex or developer-facing products where UX quality depends on deep product understanding.
• Craft authority: You are a quality bar, not just someone who appreciates quality. You can identify great work, explain why it's great, and hold the line on standards even when it's uncomfortable.
• Strategic influence, not just strategic thinking: You have made design a co-equal in product conversations, not a downstream function. You know how to bring people with you, create debate, and drive decisions.
• Structured problem-solving under ambiguity: You find your way into unclear problems and create a plan. You don't just ask good questions, you answer them. You move forward when there's no map.
• AI-era product judgment: You understand the AI, automation, or adjacent tooling landscape and can turn emerging patterns into usable, trustworthy product experiences.
• Research literacy: You know how to build research into product development so insight becomes part of how teams make decisions, not a separate artifact.
• Data-informed decision making: You use product analytics, research, and customer evidence to guide decisions instead of relying on taste or opinion alone.
• Org design and performance management: You can design team structures, define career paths, raise expectations, and handle difficult performance conversations with clarity.

Nice-to-haves

• Open-source or community product experience: You have worked on open-source, fair-code, community-led, or builder-driven products and understand what it means to design for a community that has strong opinions.
• Design engineering credibility: You have enough front-end or design engineering fluency to partner deeply on design system adoption and implementation quality.
• Remote-first operating systems: You have built design rituals, critique, QA, and collaboration practices that work across distributed teams and time zones.
• Growth surface experience: You have worked on activation, onboarding, templates, time-to-value, or product-led growth surfaces.
• Rising Design Manager profile: We are open to someone who has been an exceptional Design Manager and is ready for their first Head-level role, if the fundamentals are exceptional.