As Associate Director of User Experience, you are accountable for the quality, clarity, and direction of UX across multiple high-visibility initiatives. You help define how UX thinking shows up in work, teams, and stakeholder relationships—setting standards, shaping decisions, and guiding trade-offs across complex problem spaces. You operate with clear authority over UX direction while partnering closely with creative, strategy, and technology leadership.
You lead through design intelligence, clarity of thinking, and proximity to the work. You bring deep UX design judgment—systems thinking, information architecture, interaction design—alongside strong visual and experiential sensibility. You are comfortable working directly in design artifacts to shape direction, translate complexity into clarity, and raise the quality of thinking and craft across the team. Your authority comes from UX design IQ and hands-on guidance—not distance from the work.
You bring a grounded, thoughtful approach to working with people—supporting designers, contributing to hiring, and helping shape a team culture that values clarity, respect, and high-quality work.
You will:
- Work with the Director of User Experience to lead a multi-disciplinary team of UX and Product Designers through hands-on guidance, concrete feedback, and shared problem solving.
- Personally shape UX direction by working directly in interaction models, experience architectures, user flows, wireframes, and prototypes, using artifacts to clarify decisions and set direction.
- Translate complex, ambiguous problem spaces into clear UX problem statements, principles, and experience direction that teams can confidently execute against.
- Champion the user’s perspective and thoughtfully challenge senior stakeholders when user needs or experience quality are compromised.
- Collaborate deeply across design, strategy, content, technology, media, and production to synthesize inputs into cohesive, high-quality experiences.
- Visualize and communicate UX and design thinking to stakeholders through clear narratives and high-quality visual artifacts.
- Facilitate working sessions and workshops that move teams from exploration to alignment and decision.
- Lead the thoughtful integration of AI tools and principles into UX workflows and experiences, focusing on usefulness, clarity, and trust rather than novelty.
- Oversee multiple high-visibility initiatives, fluidly shifting between strategic framing and detailed design direction as needed.
- Support recruiting, resourcing, and team development with a clear point of view on what strong UX design looks like and how quality is achieved at scale.
- Use hands-on involvement selectively and intentionally to unblock complexity, raise quality, and guide direction—rather than to own execution of individual deliverables.
You have:
- Deep UX design intelligence, including systems thinking, information architecture, interaction design, and usability reasoning.
- Demonstrated ability to simplify complex UX systems and articulate why a given experience works—or does not.
- Strong design judgment and the ability to critique work constructively and decisively.
- Hands-on fluency with UX and prototyping tools, using artifacts as a primary thinking and communication medium.
- Experience leading designers through proximity to the work rather than arm’s-length oversight.
- A refined aesthetic sensibility and attention to detail appropriate for premium or luxury digital experiences.
- Thoughtful perspectives on how AI can support research, synthesis, ideation, and production.
- 5–7+ years of experience in UX, Product Design, or related disciplines, including complex digital ecosystems.
- 3+ years of experience in a supervisory or leadership role.
- Strong communication and storytelling skills across verbal, written, and visual formats.
- Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG 2.0 A/AA).
Our new hires & employees are the future of our organization, and we want to set you up for long-term success. In an effort to do so, we expect our team to work from an office a minimum of 3 days a week.
What We Offer:
- Maternity and parental leave extra days
- Competitive benefits packages
- Vacation, compassionate leave, sick days, and flex days
- Access to online services for families and new parents
- Diversity and Inclusion Board with 13 affinity groups
- Internal learning and development programs
- Enterprise-wide employee discounts
- And more…
Please note you are applying to an active job posting.
Critical Mass is an equal opportunity employer.
Critical Mass uses artificial intelligence in our recruitment process to enhance job postings, filter keywords during the review of prospective candidates, and, in some cases, transcribe interviews with our recruiters. Human review remains central to the process, and all hiring decisions are ultimately made by our team.
The Critical Mass Talent Acquisition team will only communicate from email addresses that use the URLs criticalmass.com, omc.com and us.greenhouse-mail.io. We will not use apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Google Hangouts for communicating with you. We will never ask you to send us money, technology, or anything else to work for our company. If you believe you are the victim of a scam, please review your local government consumer protections guidance and reach out to them directly.
If U.S. based: https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/job-scams#avoid
If Canada based: https://www.canada.ca/en/services/finance/consumer-affairs.html
If U.K. based: https://www.gov.uk/consumer-protection-rights
If Costa Rica based: https://www.consumo.go.cr/educacion_consumidor/consejos_practicos.aspx
