Director, Experience Design - Streeteasy

Zillow Zillow · Consumer · NY · Remote

Director of Experience Design for StreetEasy, leading design, research, and content design for buying, selling, and renting experiences. The role involves shaping customer experiences across platforms, partnering with leadership, and guiding the team in exploring and adopting AI-enabled workflows, including prototyping, content generation, and the design of AI-powered product experiences like personalization and recommendations. Experience designing AI-powered or algorithmically driven experiences is required.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead, grow, and develop a multidisciplinary Experience Design team spanning product design, user experience research, and content design, including managing managers and developing second-line leaders.
  2. Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to define strategy, set objectives, and drive a clear design vision grounded in customer insight and business impact.
  3. Elevate design, research, and content as core inputs to product strategy and decision-making, not just execution.
  4. Guide the team in exploring and adopting AI-enabled workflows, including prototyping, content generation, and the design of AI-powered product experiences such as personalization and recommendations.
  5. Champion evidence-based decision-making by using research, analytics, and experimentation to inform experience strategy and iteration.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of experience designing digital marketplace, e-commerce, or consumer internet experiences.
  • 7+ years of people leadership experience leading multidisciplinary design teams, including experience managing managers and developing emerging leaders.
  • Proven ability to define a long-term design vision and translate it into practical, iterative plans that deliver measurable impact.
  • Experience leading product design across multiple platforms, with strong judgment in interaction design, visual quality, and customer experience.
  • Experience designing AI-powered or algorithmically driven experiences, such as recommendations, personalization, or conversational interfaces.
  • Deep experience with experimentation-driven design, defining how qualitative research, behavioral data, and testing inform decisions and scale across the product lifecycle.
  • Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence partners and senior leaders across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Data Science, and Strategy.
  • Experience operating effectively in a matrixed organization and balancing local team autonomy with shared standards and practices.

Nice to have

  • Comfortable using AI-assisted design tools and able to distinguish where automation accelerates work and where human craft and judgment matter most.

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-enabled workflows
  • AI-powered product experiences
  • designing AI-powered or algorithmically driven experiences