Director, Product Design

Meet SwiftlySwiftly is on a mission to help cities move more efficiently. We are the leading transit data platform for agencies to share real-time passenger information, manage day-to-day operations, and improve service performance.
Today, over 190 transit agencies in 12 countries – including LA Metro, MARTA, SEPTA, and MBTA – rely on Swiftly to improve on-time performance by up to 40% and increase passenger information accuracy by up to 50%. The result is better service reliability, increased ridership, and more efficient transit operations.
Swiftly's HQ office is located in San Francisco, CA, but we’re a fully distributed team open to candidates in most U.S. locations as well as Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. (At this time we are unable to provide Visa sponsorship.)
The RoleWe’re looking for a strategic, visionary, and hands-on Director of Product Design to lead Swiftly’s design practice, elevate the craft, and shape the future of our products that improve mobility in cities of all sizes.
Reporting to the Chief Product Officer, you’ll lead and grow a talented design team and partner closely with Product Management and Engineering leadership to build a world-class, cross-functional product organization. You’ll set the design vision, scale our design systems and operations, and ensure our experiences are both powerfully functional and beautifully intuitive.
We’re seeking a detail-obsessed, big-picture-enthralled Director of Product Design to set the vision for our products, lead and grow a world-class product design team, and steward our design practices at a time when the craft is evolving quickly.

What you'll do

• You will work closely with Product Management and Engineering leadership to build a cross-functional product development engine that understands the power of design and emphasizes product experience, lovability, and impact.
• Drive and garner buy-in for a holistic overarching vision that brings our Company and Product strategy to life. Articulate and share this vision with leadership and the company at large to catalyze, align, and energize the company in making cities move more efficiently.
• You'll set the standard for design experiences across native mobile, web platform, and agentic workflows. You’ll help your team balance refined design opinion with direct usage & anecdotal feedback to ensure our products stay intuitive, fresh, and focused on solving real problems.
• You’ll realize a cadence of rapid iteration and execution, encouraging designers to share early and often, make decisions with the right amount of information, drive alignment across functions with living prototypes, and maintain dev-ready designs in lock step with development.
• You’ll refine and scale our design practices. From maturing our design system to systematizing user research to making design reviews excellent, bringing learnings from your own design work and also pulling in emergent best practices as the design ops landscape changes.
• Represent Product Design and the greater Product Org alongside Product Management and Engineering in company leadership meetings, bringing customer pains and insights to life to inform strategy.
• You’ll build on Swiftly’s culture of curiosity, feedback, and inclusion, helping designers stretch their craft, challenge ideas with care, and grow through collaboration.

What we're looking for

• 10+ years of product design experience, with 5+ years in leadership roles. A very good designer in your own right, you are an engaged and experienced manager who likes keeping your design skills sharp.
• Proven success shaping design strategy for B2B or B2B2C products with consumer-grade usability standards.
• Experience hiring & coaching junior and senior designers through the full life-cycle of design, from conception to completion, sharing the vision through design explorations, documentation, and presentations.
• Proven ability to scale design orgs and systems in a matrixed, cross-functional team environment.
• Experience creating and maintaining multi-platform design systems (mobile, desktop, APIs, etc. Hardware a plus.)
• Deep expertise in making complex, data-heavy applications feel specially crafted and delightful for users.
• Experience designing thoughtful AI/ML-powered products that not only solve problems but also build customer trust.
• Strong storytelling and communication skills — able to synthesize complexity and drive alignment across leadership.

Beyond the Skills: We’re looking for candidates passionate about mobility, sustainability, and mission-oriented impact. You’ll thrive here if you embody Swiftly’s core values:

• Team. Together, we are more effective and better supported
• Impact. Dr