Original listing text, shown exactly as published by the company.
What you'll do
Own the quality bar
- Set a clear, consistent quality bar that the team can orient around and build toward, so great work becomes the natural output of how we design together.
- Build review processes and critique rituals that give the team a shared language for quality and the confidence to make strong craft decisions together.
- Evolve the design system and QA practices so the bar rises as the team grows.
- Dig into one of the most genuinely interesting UX challenges in the space: n8n has historically had a steep learning curve for new users. Your job is to lower that floor without losing the power that experienced builders love.
Drive design's strategic influence
- Shape product strategy, not just respond to it. Bring design thinking into roadmap conversations and help surface user problems before they become someone else's brief.
- Help lead n8n's expansion toward a broader, less technical audience, a deliberate and exciting strategic shift that design should be leading.
- Build the kind of relationships with Product, Engineering, and leadership where design is a genuine thought partner at every stage.
Build and grow the team
- Lead a team of around 14 designers today: 2 Design Leads each working with ~6 ICs, plus Design Engineering and UX Research (with more hires ahead).
- Shape the team structure, career framework, and progression paths so people know where they stand and where they're going.
- Create a culture of high standards and honest feedback, where people feel supported to do their best work and have a clear sense of what great looks like.
- Own hiring and headcount planning for the department, and help us grow without losing what makes the team good.
Build research into how we make decisions
- Establish a pragmatic, continuous research practice from the ground up. We're making our first dedicated UX research hires, so there's real room to shape this.
- Make customer insight, product data, and community feedback a live input to product decisions, so teams are building from evidence at every step.
- Connect research to the decisions that matter most: activation, adoption, retention, and helping new users find their way into n8n with confidence.
Help the team work in new ways
- Champion practical AI adoption inside the design org, from prototyping and research synthesis to design QA and workflow efficiency.
- Help the team stay curious and current as the tools, patterns, and expectations around AI products continue to evolve fast.
- Model the kind of working style you want to see: thoughtful, adaptive, and genuinely excited about what's changing.
Requirements
Must-haves
- 🧭 Product design leadership: You have managed managers, coached senior designers, and built design teams that improve both craft and business outcomes, including making hard performance calls when needed.
- 🧩 Complex product systems experience: You have led design across complex or developer-facing products where UX quality depends on deep product understanding.
- 🎨 Craft authority: You are a quality bar, not just someone who appreciates quality. You can identify great work, explain why it's great, and hold the line on standards even when it's uncomfortable.
- 📣 Strategic influence, not just strategic thinking: You have made design a co-equal in product conversations, not a downstream function. You know how to bring people with you, create debate, and drive decisions.
- 🔀 Structured problem-solving under ambiguity: You find your way into unclear problems and create a plan. You don't just ask good questions, you answer them. You move forward when there's no map.
- 🤖 AI-era product judgment: You understand the AI, automation, or adjacent tooling landscape and can turn emerging patterns into usable, trustworthy product experiences.
- 🔍 Research literacy: You know how to build research into product development so insight becomes part of how teams make decisions, not a separate artifact.
- 📊 Data-informed decision making: You use product analytics, research, and customer evidence to guide decisions instead of relying on taste or opinion alone.
- 🧱 Org design and performance management: You can design team structures, define career paths, raise expectations, and handle difficult performance conversations with clarity.
Nice-to-haves
- 🌱 Open-source or community product experience: You have worked on open-source, fair-code, community-led, or builder-driven products and understand what it means to design for a community that has strong opinions.
- 💻 Design engineering credibility: You have enough front-end or design engineering fluency to partner deeply on design system adoption and implementation quality.
- 🌍 Remote-first operating systems: You have built design rituals, critique, QA, and collaboration practices that work across distributed teams and time zones.
- 🚀 Growth surface experience: You have worked on activation, onboarding, templates, time-to-value, or product-led growth surfaces.
- ⬆️ Rising Design Manager profile: We are open to someone who has been an exceptional Design Manager and is ready for their first Head-level role, if the fundamentals are exceptional.
n8n is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
We can sponsor visas to Germany; for any other country, you need to have existing right to work.
