Director, Product Design

Dropbox

Director of Product Design overseeing Dropbox’s design system evolution and team management. Leading the strategy for high quality multi product experiences in a remote setting.

Posted 6/30/2026full-timeRemote • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $209,400 - $318,800 per yearWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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

What you’ll need

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.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Health insurance
401(k) matching
Flexible work hours
Paid time off
Remote work options

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

Product DesignDesign TechnologyInteraction DesignInformation ArchitecturePrototypingAccessibility StandardsComponent ArchitectureQuality ControlGovernance ModelsLifecycle Processes

Soft Skills

Collaborative LeadershipInfluencing Senior PartnersTalent DevelopmentCritique ImprovementLow Ego Leadership