Head of Design, Yahoo Mail

About this role

Yahoo Mail is the ultimate consumer inbox with hundreds of millions of users. It’s the best way to access your email and stay organized from a computer, phone or tablet. With its beautiful design and lightning fast speed, Yahoo Mail makes reading, organizing, and sending emails easier than ever.

About the Role We are seeking a Head of Design (Senior Director) to lead Yahoo Mail's global design organization. In this role, you will own the end-to-end design vision, architectural strategy, and system optimization across Mail's entire product surface. You will lead an integrated team of approximately 20 designers—including design managers—embedded across cross-functional squads spanning Revenue & Growth, Core Experience, and Utilities (Calendar, Planner, and more).

You will operate as a strategic peer and equal partner alongside Product, Engineering, and Analytics leadership. You will champion an environment that treats AI as a fundamental layer for product innovation and operational efficiency, orchestrating how AI-native experiences and intelligent agentic workflows materialize safely and beautifully at scale.

What You'll Do • Leadership & Organization Development: Provide leadership and strategic direction for the ~20-member design organization through subordinate managers and senior leads; establish clear objective-setting frameworks and maintain a culture that balances aggressive output accountability with professional bench strength development.

• Design Vision & Corporate Strategy: Formulate and drive an enterprise-wide design vision that explicitly transforms user needs into business drivers; mandate, govern, and scale cross-platform design systems across mobile (iOS/Android) and web surfaces.

• Strategic Executive Partnership: Collaborate as a peer with the GM, VP of Product, VP of Revenue, Head of Analytics, and SVP of Engineering to translate corporate business strategy into definitive product roadmaps and platform-wide optimization cycles.

• AI-Augmented Experience Architecture: Architect the UX paradigms for AI-native consumer journeys within Yahoo Mail, specifying structural patterns for conversational interfaces, proactive agentic workflows, and real-time intelligent data visualizations.

• Design Operations Automation: Drive structural efficiency across the design organization by identifying, implementing, and scaling generative AI-driven design workflows; replace traditional manual design tasks with automated UI generation, accelerated component prototyping, and rapid asset iteration pipelines.

• Systemic Output Validation & Governance: Establish strict design review governance frameworks to evaluate, refine, and validate AI-generated product behaviors; implement rigorous safeguards to ensure automated elements eliminate layout hallucinations, protect user data trust, and maintain brand compliance.

• Experimentation, Metrics, & Monetization: Direct the design framework for high-volume multivariate monetization tests across subscriptions, affiliate marketing, and digital advertising surfaces; leverage data fluency to connect UX structures directly to engagement, conversion, retention, and revenue outcomes.

• Central Leverage Integration: Align Yahoo Mail's local design strategies with central Yahoo Design systems to maximize engineering and branding leverage, while fiercely protecting Yahoo Mail's business unit priorities.

Basic Qualifications • 15+ years of professional product design experience, with documented success guiding high-volume consumer products operating at a scale of millions of daily active users.

• 5+ years of formal management experience leading multi-tiered design teams of 15+ total personnel, including direct experience managing, coaching, and scaling professional design managers.

• Proven track record designing, launching, and governing AI-powered product features, recommendation models, or conversational interfaces in a production environment.

• Demonstrated experience deploying and managing AI-augmented design systems or generative workflow tools at an organizational tier to increase asset generation speed and prototype velocity.

• Extensive portfolio demonstrating advanced cross-platform design architecture across web, iOS, and Android ecosystems, with an emphasis on seamless data synchronization.

• Advanced business acumen and data proficiency, including experience designing user interfaces tailored explicitly to consumer business monetization funnels (advertising, subscriptions, or transactional commerce).

• Exceptional communication, corporate diplomacy, and negotiation skills, with verified experience advocating for design capital and strategy before executive leadership and C-suite stakeholders.

• Bachelor’s degree in Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), or a closely related field, or equivalent practical experience verified through a robust history of professional enterprise leadership.

Preferred Qualifications • Direct experience with advanced prompt engineering frameworks, structured LLM fine-tuning interactions, or designing feedback loops that train consumer-facing AI systems.

• Experience managing UX design within highly complex, high-traffic messaging, communication, productivity, or high-volume utility application spaces.

• Deep technical familiarity with automated front-end engineering systems, advanced analytics setups, and algorithmic content recommendation engines.

• An active focus on emerging design technologies, with a history of driving structural experimentation and change management in shifting, high-growth technology environments.

The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies ; exercising sound judgment ; working effectively, safely and inclusively with others ; exhibiting trustworthiness and meeting expectations ; and safeguarding business operations and brand integrity.

At Yahoo, we offer flexible hybrid work options that o

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