Senior Director & Head of Design
DriveCentric, Inc.The problem we are hiring you to solve
DriveCentric is the AI Engagement Platform built for automotive dealerships. Through DriveCentric AI Labs we ship native AI agents at a cadence of roughly one every 30 days, across Sales, Service, F&I, and Marketing.
That creates a design problem worth taking seriously. How does a dealership employee actually work alongside a growing fleet of agents, on the same customer, in the same platform, without the experience turning into noise?
We are hiring a Senior Director of Product Design to answer it. You will lead product design for the DriveCentric platform, define how we design agentic experiences, own information architecture across our product lines, and modernize how our team designs and builds.
This is a player-coach role. You will lead a small, growing design team and you will still be personally in the work.
What you will own
DriveCentric is the AI Engagement Platform built for automotive dealerships. Through DriveCentric AI Labs we ship native AI agents at a cadence of roughly one every 30 days, across Sales, Service, F&I, and Marketing.
That creates a design problem worth taking seriously. How does a dealership employee actually work alongside a growing fleet of agents, on the same customer, in the same platform, without the experience turning into noise?
We are hiring a Senior Director of Product Design to answer it. You will lead product design for the DriveCentric platform, define how we design agentic experiences, own information architecture across our product lines, and modernize how our team designs and builds.
This is a player-coach role. You will lead a small, growing design team and you will still be personally in the work.
What you will own
- Agentic experience design. How our agents behave in front of a human being. Designing for probabilistic systems where confidence, ambiguity, and failure are first-class states. Trust and transparency, so users can see what an agent did and why. The progressive autonomy ladder from suggest, to draft, to act with approval, to act on its own. And the handoff moment when a conversation moves from an agent to a real person without the customer feeling the seam.
- Information architecture across product lines. IA coherent navigation, taxonomy, and permissions model spanning desktop and mobile, where one customer stays one record no matter which department is acting on them. This is a live platform with real customers, so it calls for staged, credible sequencing rather than a big-bang redesign.
- How we design and build. Working prototypes as the default artifact instead of static frames. Designers building with AI tooling and shipping real code where it accelerates the work. Internal tooling that lets partners across the company produce on-brand work from design system components. And a craft bar that holds while everything speeds up.
- The design system. A versioned, adopted, measurable product with real consumers, with accessibility built into the components rather than audited afterward.
- The team. Lead, coach, and grow a small product design team, hire deliberately as we scale, and act as a peer to product and engineering leadership. You will spend real time in dealerships. That is a feature of this job.
What we are looking for
This list is short on purpose. If you meet these, apply, even if you do not match everything in the next section.
- 8+ years designing software, including 3+ years leading designers in B2B SaaS. You have managed individual contributors, not only projects.
- You have shipped AI-native or agentic features to production in a real product with real users. Not concepts, not a hackathon. We will want to talk about what broke and what you changed.
- You personally build working prototypes with AI tooling. Cursor, Claude, v0, Figma Make, whatever you have standardized on. You will be asked to do this with us during the process. This one is a hard requirement.
- You have restructured the information architecture of a mature, complex product that had existing customers and existing habits, and you can explain the migration path, not just the end state.
- You have owned a design system used by multiple product lines and multiple engineering teams, and can speak to adoption and governance.
- You have designed dense, operational software for non-technical professionals who use it all day under time pressure. Enterprise workflow, operations, healthcare, logistics, field service, fintech back office. A consumer-only background will be a stretch here.
- You are still in the craft. You want to lead a team and personally design the hardest thing on the roadmap.
Nice to have
- Automotive retail, dealership operations, or DMS and CRM adjacency.
- You have reshaped a product built on an older paradigm around AI, rather than joining something AI-native on day one. That is precisely our situation.
- A design engineering background, or internal tools you built that changed how a team works.
- You have written or spoken publicly about agentic UX, trust and control patterns, or AI in the design process.
What this role is not
- It is not a brand, marketing, or web design role. Those live with Marketing, and you will partner with them.
- It is not greenfield. You are inheriting a mature platform, thousands of daily users, and real constraints. The satisfaction here is in the untangling.
- It is not a role where design waits for a spec. You shape what gets built.
- It is not a VP role, and we will not pretend otherwise. The scope is large and the level is Senior Director. If title is the deciding factor for you, better that we both know early.
How we hire
We will be explicit so you can prepare. A portfolio review built around two deep case studies, one agentic or AI experience you shipped and one information architecture or systems restructure. A live, collaborative prototyping session on a real DriveCentric problem using your own tooling, which is not spec work and not an unpaid deliverable. A leadership conversation about how you develop designers and set a craft bar. Conversations with product, engineering, and R&D. Then a final conversation with our Chief Product and Business Officer.
We will be explicit so you can prepare. A portfolio review built around two deep case studies, one agentic or AI experience you shipped and one information architecture or systems restructure. A live, collaborative prototyping session on a real DriveCentric problem using your own tooling, which is not spec work and not an unpaid deliverable. A leadership conversation about how you develop designers and set a craft bar. Conversations with product, engineering, and R&D. Then a final conversation with our Chief Product and Business Officer.
Benefits
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Paid Time Off
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Nine (9) Paid Holidays
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401(k) plus employer match
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Health Insurance
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Flexible Spending Account
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Health Savings Account
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Dental Insurance
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Vision Insurance
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Short/Long-Term Disability Insurance
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Employer-paid Life Insurance
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Additional Voluntary Life Insurance
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Accident Insurance
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Critical Care Insurance
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Hospital Indemnity Insurance
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Employee Assistance Program
Equal Opportunity Statement:
DriveCentric is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other protected characteristics. All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply.