Director, Experience Design

Proto leads innovation and transformation efforts for large organizations, often through the creation of new products, services, and platforms. The work involves understanding user needs, system behavior, and technical possibilities, and using that understanding to design solutions that are coherent, usable, and grounded in real constraints.

The Director, Experience Design owns experience direction on our most demanding engagements. Our starting premise is that complexity is usually a symptom of ambiguous intent, and that the way through it is to organize the system around behavior: what people are trying to do, which of those behaviors create the most value, and what structure best serves them. Directors translate that into artifacts clients can see and judge, from behavior maps and journeys to service models and working prototypes, early enough to shape a decision rather than decorate one already made. The role is hands-on and accountable. You set the direction, make the work, lead the team doing it, and own whether it holds up in front of a C-suite.

What You Will Do

• Own experience direction by setting the design point of view on an engagement, defining experience principles and goals, and holding the work to them from framing through delivery;
• Organize systems around behavior: model how work actually gets done across users, systems, and touchpoints, identify where value concentrates, and use that to define what the system should be;
• Make the future tangible by bringing prototypes, demos, and simulations upstream so clients can evaluate a direction while it is still cheap to change, calibrating fidelity to the decision at hand;
• Carry work from concept to pilot, moving ideas through sketches, wireframes, and proofs of concept into piloting and execution, and staying involved as real-world feedback reshapes the design;
• Lead client decision-making by facilitating working sessions and presenting to executive audiences clearly and directly, using narrative and concrete artifacts to move decisions forward;
• Build and lead the team: manage and develop designers, set clear expectations, give direct feedback, and own delivery end-to-end so complexity resolves at your level rather than escalating;
• Advance the Experience practice by contributing to internal methods, patterns, and external points of view, and help define what Experience Design at Proto is as the department grows.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in experience design, service design, interaction design, or systems design within innovation, consultancy, product, or venture-building contexts;
• Undergraduate and/or graduate degree in design, human-centered computing, psychology, engineering, or a related field;
• Proven ability to own complex projects from early framing through delivery, with a portfolio showing systems-level judgment and depth of thinking, not just surface polish;
• Fluency in journey mapping, interaction modeling, service blueprints, prototyping, and usability evaluation combined with an understanding of technical constraints, tradeoffs, and system behavior;
• Experience turning ambiguous, high-stakes problems into structured design direction that informs product, investment, or organizational decisions;
• Proven ability to lead senior stakeholders through uncertainty, and to make design decisions legible to people who are not designers;
• Experience managing and developing designers, with evidence that people got measurably better working for you;
• Operational resilience, including the ability to maintain quality under pressure, manage multiple workstreams, and work through periods of intensity and change;
• Good judgment and low ego. Able to stay calm under pressure and handle disagreement constructively.

In New York City, the base salary for this position is $170,000-$190,000. Individual compensation varies based on job-related factors including years of relevant skills and experience, level of responsibility, and qualifications. This position is based out of the New York office and reports into our Partner, Managing Director of Experience.

Proto is a New York based company with offices at 120 Broadway, 34th Floor. Our staff is encouraged to work-from-office on days of their choosing based on personal preferences, collaboration moments, client meetings, and all-company gatherings. We also support workplace flexibility and have made work-from-anywhere available to all staff (within a 3-hour time zone of eastern standard time zone). Our core business hours are generally 9:30am-6:00pm EST; however, due to our client service model and collaborative working culture, individual working hours fluctuate to reflect client deadlines and deliverables.

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