Director, Product Design

Role Description

Dropbox’s Design team is looking for a Director of Product Design to define the next generation of product experiences and infrastructure for Dropbox. In this role, you will lead the vision, strategy, and execution for the systems, patterns, and operating model that shape how Dropbox builds coherent, high quality, multi product experiences at scale.

We are building a modern system that can support a broader portfolio of products, accelerate product teams to achieve product market fit, improve front end quality, and create durable patterns for the most important product experiences across Dropbox. You will lead the team responsible for turning repeated product needs into reusable experience infrastructure: interaction patterns, product frameworks, design primitives, implementation standards, and adoption models that make it easier for teams to build excellent Dropbox experiences.

As Director, you will oversee the evolution of Dropbox’s design system into a next generation design and technology platform. This includes the foundational system of components, tokens, accessibility standards, and documentation, but also the broader lifecycle of product patterns: how they are identified, designed, validated, built, adopted, measured, improved, and eventually deprecated. You will help move the team from a reactive model, where design systems patternize work after the fact, to a more proactive model, where the team helps shape core product experiences from the beginning.

You will also establish Design Systems and Design Technology as a center of excellence for front end product quality. This team should not only define what good looks like, but help build it. That means partnering deeply with product designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, brand, and leadership to create high leverage patterns that improve product coherence, accelerate execution, and raise the quality bar across web, mobile, desktop, and emerging AI native experiences.

The ideal candidate is a systems minded design leader with excellent product judgment, strong craft standards, deep experience leading multidisciplinary teams, and the ability to operate across strategy, execution, governance, and organizational influence. You should be equally comfortable defining a long term vision for the future of design systems, reviewing the details of a complex interaction pattern, partnering with engineering on implementation quality, and helping senior leaders understand where the product experience needs stronger horizontal investment.

This is a critical leadership role for Dropbox’s multi product future. You will help define how shared product experiences are built, how teams adopt them, how quality scales, and how Dropbox creates a more coherent, intelligent, and durable product experience for customers.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.

Compensation

US Zone 1

This role is not available in Zone 1