Director, Product Design

Dropbox is a Virtual First company seeking a Director of Product Design to lead the vision and strategy for their design systems and product experiences. The role involves overseeing the evolution of Dropbox's design system and establishing a center of excellence for front end product quality while collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance product coherence and execution.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the vision for Dropbox’s next generation design system, expanding it from a component library into a broader product experience platform for patterns, primitives, standards, and shared product logic
• Lead Design Systems and Design Technology as a center of excellence for front end product quality, interaction patterns, accessibility, implementation standards, and cross product experience coherence
• Build and evolve reusable product patterns that drive core Dropbox experiences, including navigation, creation flows, sharing, permissions, collaboration, onboarding, search, content activation, notifications, settings, admin workflows, and AI assisted experiences
• Move the team from reactive patternization to proactive product leadership, helping identify horizontal product needs early and shaping solutions that can scale across multiple Dropbox surfaces and teams
• Own the full lifecycle of shared patterns and components, including discovery, definition, design, prototyping, engineering partnership, adoption, measurement, maintenance, governance, and deprecation
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Brand, Marketing, and Design leadership to align on the highest impact horizontal opportunities and ensure shared systems directly support product strategy
• Raise the craft and quality bar across Dropbox by improving interaction design, visual quality, information architecture, accessibility, motion, content patterns, implementation fidelity, and front end consistency
• Create an operating model that makes adoption desirable rather than mandated, ensuring product teams see the system as a way to move faster, build better, and reduce duplicated effort
• Lead and develop a team of designers, design technologists, and systems specialists, creating clear ownership, strong critique practices, high standards, and a culture of pragmatic systems thinking
• Partner with engineering leadership to improve the relationship between design systems, code, product infrastructure, and front end delivery, ensuring that design intent is translated into high quality implementation
• Establish durable governance, measurement, and contribution models that help the system evolve continuously while maintaining quality, coherence, and accountability
• Help Dropbox prepare for AI native product experiences by defining systems that can encode design knowledge, guide product decisions, and support more adaptive, contextual, and intelligent experiences over time

Requirements:

• 12+ years of product design, design systems, design technology, or front end experience, including significant experience leading complex systems or platform initiatives at scale
• 5+ years of people management experience, with a strong track record of leading senior designers, managers, design technologists, or multidisciplinary systems teams
• Deep experience building, scaling, or transforming design systems for complex multi product organizations
• Strong product judgment and the ability to connect systems work directly to customer value, product strategy, execution speed, and business impact
• Exceptional systems thinking, with the ability to see patterns across teams, products, platforms, and workflows, then turn those patterns into reusable experience infrastructure
• High craft standards across interaction design, information architecture, visual design, accessibility, prototyping, content patterns, motion, and implementation quality
• Proven ability to influence senior cross functional partners, create alignment across ambiguous problem spaces, and drive horizontal product quality without relying on mandate alone
• Strong technical fluency and comfort partnering with front end engineering teams on component architecture, implementation standards, platform constraints, quality control, and system adoption
• Experience defining governance models, contribution models, quality standards, documentation practices, and lifecycle processes for shared product systems
• A clear point of view on the future of design systems, including how AI, design technology, design infrastructure, and reusable product logic should change how teams design and build
• A collaborative, low ego leadership style, with a track record of developing talent, raising standards, improving critique, and helping teams produce better work than they could have produced on their own
• A portfolio or body of work that demonstrates strong design leadership, systems strategy, product impact, organizational influence, and excellent taste
• Experience leading design systems, design technology, front end platform, or product infrastructure teams in a large scale, multi product organization
• Deep understanding of how to leverage content systems as part and parcel of the overall design system
• Experience building shared patterns for complex product domains such as collaboration, content management, permissions, search, productivity, AI, administration, or multi product ecosystems
• Strong technical fluency across coded systems, design tokens, component architecture, accessibility infrastructure, prototyping tools, and front end implementation quality
• A strong point of view on the future of design systems, including how AI, design technology, and reusable product logic should evolve the way teams design and build