Design Director – AI Platform

About the role

ai71 builds enterprise-grade AI for governments, banks and large enterprises, with its flagship product Ask, an agentic AI platform running inside customers' own stacks or sovereign clouds. The design team is small (two full-time designers and two contractors) and needs a Design Director in Abu Dhabi, onsite, in a player-coach role who designs every week, owns surfaces and sets the bar with their own work.

Key responsibilities

• Design weekly, own surfaces of Ask and ship them alongside the team.
• Raise the craft through example and coaching: set standards for core surfaces, run critiques and make each designer measurably better.
• Use AI coding agents to make working-code prototypes the team's default artefact and explore more directions before decisions.
• Give the team structure, ways of working, clear ownership and career paths, and protect ownership of the design system.
• Hire and manage a brand designer, and partner with Product Marketing and Demand so product, website and brand feel like one company.
• Coach senior designers who want to stay hands-on, and lead a team of about four designers reporting to the Head of Product.
• Design for constrained environments: on-prem and air-gapped deployments, sovereign clouds, multi-lingual and right-to-left interfaces.

Required profile

• 10+ years in design, having led teams at strong product companies while keeping making the work yourself.
• Portfolio showing attention to detail, with a design system that others ship faster because of.
• Uses AI tools daily, including coding agents and image-generation models, with proof of the results.
• Brand experience alongside product is a strong plus, as is Arabic, agentic or AI-product design, or experience designing for enterprise and regulated buyers.

What we offer

• Relocation support and residence visas for you and your family.
• Annual leave of 26 working days and maternity leave of 120 calendar days at 100% pay.
• Health insurance (Daman Gold) for employee and dependents, and an annual flight ticket to the passport country.
• Education allowance of up to AED 40K per child, for a maximum of 3 children to age 18.
• Annual bonus of 30% of annual salary and 0% income tax for most nationalities.
• Breakfast and lunch provided in the office, with 6 weeks of remote work per year.