Design Leadership Jobs in San Francisco, United States of America
Find your next Design Leadership role at companies that value creative talent
Showing 15 jobs
Design Manager - Workplace Interiors & Architecture
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Gensler 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Lead all phases of corporate interior projects from inception to completion while managing client and consultant relationships. Responsible for driving project delivery, managing budgets and schedules, and mentoring junior design staff.
Design Manager
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Ava Energy 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Lead multi-discipline design coordination and master scheduling for hyperscale GPU data center builds. Establish program governance, including gates, change control, and playbooks to streamline engineering delivery.
Senior Staff UX Design Manager, Gmail
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Google 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
You will drive the strategy and execution of an agentic Gmail experience by integrating AI into legacy workflows. Additionally, you will manage a design team while collaborating with cross-functional leaders to ensure cohesive, high-quality user experiences across desktop and mobile.
Head of Design, Unified Service Platform
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Gusto 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Lead and coach a team of three designers while maintaining a hands-on player-coach role for high-leverage design work. Drive design strategy and quality for the Unified Service Platform, ensuring seamless AI-human service integration.
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Design Manager
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Fluidstack 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Own end-to-end project management of concurrent data center design and solution-delivery programs. Build and maintain integrated master schedules across various design disciplines and establish program governance.
Design Manager
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Harvey 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
The Design Manager will lead a team of designers to elevate the quality and execution of Harvey's creative work. This includes managing design execution across various brand initiatives and providing mentorship and feedback to the design team.
Design Manager
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Harvey 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Lead and mentor a team of designers to elevate the quality and consistency of Harvey's creative work across brand campaigns, events, and product launches. Act as a player-coach by translating creative direction into high-impact visual execution while managing design operations.
Product Design Manager II, Ad Formats
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Pinterest 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Lead the Ad Formats Performance Pod as a player-coach, managing a team of designers while contributing to hands-on executional design. Define product strategy and vision for conversion-oriented ad formats and AI automation adoption in partnership with cross-functional leaders.
Project Manager (Design Manager) - Sports
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Gensler 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
You will direct multidisciplinary design teams and oversee project delivery during all phases. This includes managing schedules, budgets, and client relationships while ensuring quality assurance of project documentation.
Design Systems Lead
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Perplexity 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
The Lead will bootstrap and own a semantic token system and the design system repository on GitHub to ensure product coherence across platforms. They will bridge the gap between design and engineering by managing contributions, documentation, and accessibility standards.
Sr Director, Design Systems, AI Enablement
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Gap Inc. 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Architect and lead a modern, machine-readable design system that supports multi-brand experiences across various platforms. Lead the AI enablement strategy for the Experience Design practice, ensuring seamless integration between design and engineering.
Product Design Manager, Adobe Experience Platform
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Adobe 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
As a Design Manager, you will lead a squad of product designers and set the quality bar for the team's output. You will also coach designers on their craft and career growth while advocating for the team's contributions to cross-functional partners.
Partner 20, Design Systems Lead
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
A16z 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Own and evolve the firm's design infrastructure by translating brand systems into scalable templates, AI-powered tools, and modular frameworks. Build repeatable systems and lightweight apps to enable non-designers to produce high-quality, on-brand work independently.
Partner 20, Design Systems Lead
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Andreessen Horowitz 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
The Design Systems Lead will own and evolve the design systems infrastructure, ensuring quality, consistency, and scalability. This role involves translating the a16z brand into usable templates and components while building tools that empower non-designers to create on-brand work independently.
Design Manager - Workplace Interiors
🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Gensler 🇺🇸 San Francisco, California, United States of America
Lead all phases of corporate interior projects, managing client relationships, budgets, and project schedules. Mentor junior staff and coordinate with contractors and consultants to ensure high-quality project execution.
About Design Leadership careers
Design leaders in 2026 set the strategic vision for design organizations navigating an AI-saturated market. This role requires a balance of craft expertise and high-level business acumen to advocate for design's value at the executive level.
Effective leaders foster a culture of technical agency, establishing systems that allow human creativity and machine efficiency to coexist.
Companies like Stripe and Airbnb seek VPs and Directors of Design who can scale teams and align design strategy with long-term business objectives.
We feature senior leadership positions including Design Directors, Heads of Design, VP of Design, Chief Design Officers, and design team leads at companies like Meta, Google, Airbnb, Stripe, and fast-growing AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. These roles span product design, brand, and cross-functional design organizations.
Many companies offer remote design leadership roles, including distributed-first companies like Notion, Linear, GitLab, and Vercel. AI companies like Midjourney and Anthropic also hire remote design leaders. Some companies prefer hybrid arrangements for VP+ positions.
Most positions require 8–15+ years of design experience with 3–5+ years managing teams. Strong candidates demonstrate strategic thinking, team building, stakeholder management, and a track record of shipping successful products at companies like Figma, Spotify, Netflix, or emerging AI startups. Browse leadership portfolios to see how experienced designers showcase their impact.
Design leadership salaries are highly competitive: Design Directors earn $160k–$240k, VPs of Design $220k–$350k+, and CDOs at major companies can exceed $400k with significant equity packages. AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Databricks often offer premium total compensation. Consult our salary guide for detailed breakdowns.