Senior Director, Product Design - Auto Design

Senior Director, Product Design - Auto Design

At Capital One, we’re building a leading information-based technology company. Still founder-led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Richard Fairbank, Capital One is on a mission to help our customers succeed by bringing ingenuity, simplicity, and humanity to banking. We measure our efforts by the success our customers enjoy and the advocacy they exhibit. We’re succeeding because they’re succeeding.

Guided by our shared values, we thrive in an environment where collaboration and openness are valued. We believe that innovation is powered by perspective and that teamwork and respect for each other lead to superior results. We elevate each other and obsess about doing the right thing. Our associates serve with humility and a deep respect for their responsibility in helping our customers achieve their goals and realize their dreams. Together, we’re on a quest to change banking for good.

We’re currently seeking a Senior Director, Product Design Leader for the Top of House Auto Design Team, which is part of the Experience Design organization.

Our Top of House Design team serves as a strategic catalyst within the Auto Design organization, connecting the foundational architecture of our platform ecosystem with unified, human-centered experiences. Our team operates horizontally across high-impact product areas to align strategy, scale operational frameworks, and elevate end-to-end customer visibility. By partnering closely with leadership and cross-functional partners, Top of House Design translates complex platform capabilities into cohesive, market-leading experiences built on a standard of scalability, security, and design excellence. If you’re a creative innovator who embraces an environment where you can experiment, learn, and change banking for good, we’d love to hear from you.

Role Expectations

As Senior Director of Top of House Design, you’ll lead a talented, cross-disciplinary team of design leaders and designers, and collaborate deeply with Design, Product and Tech leadership. You’ll be responsible for identifying and advocating for high-leverage opportunities with executive stakeholders and leading high-impact, highly complex design projects that set the bar for and drive experience excellence and business outcomes.

Additional responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Partner with Product, Technology, and Business unit leaders to understand financial, technical, and experiential objectives, while helping to drive & enable design, product and experience outcomes

Inspire and mentor a team of high-potential design leaders and designers to stretch and grow their leadership and operational skills; oversee quality and efficiency of the work and create the space and support for learning and growth

Enable innovation incubation that can then scale across Auto design, including practices and processes that bring about world-class solutions

Collaborate with peer design leaders across Capital One to orchestrate the greater experience ecosystem, find efficiencies across shared technologies and common service moments, and unlock higher order value from the cross-line-of business perspective

Recruit top talent, run a best-in-class team, and invest in their continued success

Champion human-centered methodologies across the Auto line of business

Here are some of the expected competencies for this role:

Product Design Expertise: Leverage established expertise and leadership in product design to elevate the quality and maturity of the design practice at Capital One. Leveraging a variety of skills across interaction, visual and service design; in collaboration with cross-functional partners, help to oversee and optimize the use of appropriate tools, platforms, frameworks and design systems and enable your team to develop artifacts that may include vision stories, journey maps, blueprints, high-fidelity designs and prototypes

Leadership: Build a thriving community of designers who are well supported, trained for excellence and able to collaborate with peers in multiple functions and set the vision and strategic direction for your team in close partnership with your cross-functional partners.

Human-Centered: Recognize and pursue opportunities where customer needs and business goals coincide, while reinforcing with teammates and partners the importance of collecting and considering diverse customer perspectives throughout the design process

Business-Focused: Demonstrate a mastery of products, processes, customers, competitors and broader industry trends and apply this knowledge to predict shifts in these areas and shape how Design should engage, uncover and solve significant business challenges

Problem-Solving: Revels in the art of the possible, driving cross-functional groups in thinking creatively about potential solutions, illuminating potential pitfalls and fostering shared learnings; Deep understanding for how things are interconnected and systems mindset to build frameworks for complex decision-making that enable effective debate and accelerate getting to the right solutions

Collaboration: Connect the dots across the organization, proactively bringing together executive partners in ways that drive more coherent experiences, accelerate delivery and elevate the value of design

Communication: Present work to executive leaders and stakeholders, modeling a strategic human-centered approach that integrates design frameworks, data and research insights to make the complex accessible, influence change and drive strategic direction

The ideal candidate has a strong portfolio demonstrating your leadership, process, results and impact.

Basic Qualifications:

At least 10 years of experience in leading product design teams and delivering products to market

At least 3 years managing managers

Preferred Qualifications:

At least 12 years of experience in leading product design teams and delivering products to market

Deep expertise in building, scaling, and governing enterprise-grade design systems, shared platforms, or developer/designer tool ecosystems across multi-platform environments

Deep experience leading product design teams operating across UX and UI, strategy, content, and research from strategy through delivery to market

Deep experience partnering with product managers, engineers, marketing, and analytics leaders across multiple business lines to shape strategy, performance metrics, roadmaps, and operating models

Track record of defining and deploying AI-augmented design workflows, design agents, or generative UI tooling

Demonstrated success establishing global standards for visual quality, interaction patterns, code/design parity testing, and contribution models

Proficiency with web and mobile technologies and platforms, navigating technology considerations and constraints to drive sound product and experience decisions

Proven ability to treat design systems as internal SaaS products, articulating business cases and measuring platform ROI through developer/designer velocity, defect reduction, code reusability, and time-to-market metrics

Exceptional interpersonal skills and relationship building across complex organizations

Exceptional people management and development skills

This role is designated as a hybrid position.