Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. 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
Skills
- 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
Benefits
- All regular employees are also eligible for the corporate bonus program or a sales incentive (target included in OTE) as well as stock in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
- Dropbox’s Virtual First way of working is designed to help people do their best work with flexibility, autonomy, and connection.
- Day to day, teams work remotely with nonlinear schedules and core collaboration hours that support deep focus and individual working styles.
- We prioritize asynchronous communication to improve clarity, respect deep work time, and reduce unnecessary meetings.
- While remote work is the primary experience for our employees, we also prioritize intentional, in-person connection.
- We bring teams together through regular team gatherings, on-demand workspaces, and Dropbox Neighborhood events in order to strengthen team cohesion, foster creativity, and enhance momentum.
- This role requires travel to offsites and various other team gatherings (approximately 5-10% of the year or 2-3 days per quarter).
- We provide advance notice when possible and encourage candidates to discuss any accommodation needs during the interview process.
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