Senior Director, User Experience

About Later

Later is the world’s most intelligent influencer marketing company, built to give brands the confidence to create unforgettable campaigns. By combining real creator relationships, trusted intelligence, and expert guidance, Later removes fear and guesswork from one of marketing's most visible investments. Trusted by leading enterprise brands including Nike, Wayfair, Unilever, and Southwest Airlines, Later bridges creativity and performance so campaigns don’t just look good—they deliver results.

About this position

We're looking for a Senior Director, User Experience to lead design across Later's product portfolio, spanning Later Influence, Later Social, and Mavely. You'll build and lead a team of 5 to 6 UX designers, partnering closely with roughly 10 product managers and an engineering organization of 100+ developers to ship experiences that are cohesive, intuitive, and scalable across our lines of business. This is a high-visibility role with regular exposure to senior leadership and direct influence over how brands and creators experience Later's platform.

What you'll be doing:

• Forward Deployed Execution with Strategy & Systems Thinking
  Embed directly as a hands-on, principal contributor on Later's most critical zero-to-one product bets, operating at the intersection of design, product strategy, and engineering execution.
• AI & Agentic Mastery
  Pioneer and execute agentic UX workflows, building functional AI prototypes that unify product design across Later Social, Later Influence, and Mavely.
• Leadership and Mentorship
  Lead, mentor, and elevate a high-performing team of UX designers by shifting the culture from traditional screen-design to an AI-native, builder-first mindset.
• Cross-functional Partnership
  Partner closely with the CPO and CTO to align design investment with company priorities, and co-create the product and technology strategy, vision, and roadmap.
• Craft and Quality
  Set and hold the bar for design craft across the portfolio, from interaction design to visual polish.
• Research and Insights
  Build a lightweight, repeatable approach to user research that keeps design decisions grounded in real customer and creator behavior.

What success looks like:

• Within the first 30 days, you've met the design team, key PM and engineering partners, and have a clear read on where the product experience is strong and where it's fragmented.
• Within 90 days, you've established a design operating rhythm and identified the first systems-level fix that will meaningfully improve consistency across product lines.
• Within 6 months, a shared design system is in active use across teams, design is embedded early in product discovery.
• Within 12 months, the UX team operates with clear ownership, predictable delivery, and measurable improvement in usability and consistency across Later's full product portfolio.

What you bring:

• 10+ years of experience in product design or UX, including 5+ years leading and growing a design team.
• Proven experience operating as a systems thinker, designing for coherence across multiple products or teams.
• Strong technical fluency and a track record partnering deeply with engineering on platform architecture, APIs, data models, frontend frameworks, and implementation tradeoffs.
• Experience building or scaling a design system, pattern library, or shared UX standards across a growing product surface.
• Strong facilitation and communication skills, comfortable presenting design direction to senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring and developing designers at varying levels of seniority.
• Demonstrated proficiency with AI-assisted design, prototyping, and development tools.
• Experience in B2B SaaS, marketplace, or platform products is a plus; experience in influencer marketing, creator economy, or social/commerce adjacent spaces is a bonus.