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Role Overview
Design Director at ai71, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Full-time, onsite role with relocation support provided.
Company Overview
ai71 builds enterprise-grade AI for governments, banks, and large enterprises, rooted in the Middle East and Africa. The flagship product is Ask, an agentic AI platform that deploys AI agents on an organisation's own knowledge, systems, and workflows. Ask runs infrastructure-agnostic and model-agnostic, inside a customer's existing stack or in sovereign clouds. It is deployed across knowledge-heavy functions (legal, finance, HR, procurement) in highly regulated environments including government entities, financial institutions, and industrial groups, primarily in the UAE and North Africa.
The design team is currently small: two full-time designers and two contractors, supported by a design system that carries real weight in how the company ships. The Ask product is built by squads of roughly one PM, three to four engineers, and one designer, each owning a slice of the product end-to-end.
Role Purpose
Lead the design function for Ask and ai71's external presence. You will design weekly alongside the team, raising craft through example and coaching, pushing the boundaries of what design becomes with AI tools, and owning how ai71 looks to the world across brand, website, and buyer-facing materials. This is a player-coach role: you design every week and own surfaces yourself while giving the team structure, ways of working, and leadership worth following.
Key Responsibilities
Design and Craft
- Design weekly and own surfaces of Ask yourself, shipping them in parallel with team leadership.
- Keep your portfolio live and demonstrable; if a month passes without making something, the role has drifted.
- Raise the craft through example and coaching rather than review gates.
- Set what excellent looks like on the platform's core surfaces.
- Run critiques that the team shows up for and make each designer measurably better at details.
AI and Innovation
- Push what design becomes with AI by being genuinely dangerous with AI coding agents.
- Make working-code prototypes the team's default artefact.
- Multiply the number of directions explored before decisions are made.
- Keep adapting how the team works as AI tools change.
Team Leadership and Development
- Give the team structure: ways of working, clear ownership, and career growth paths that do not force people into management.
- Coach senior designers without capping them; make them better and give them room to stay hands-on.
- Be the kind of leader other strong designers move companies for.
- Build a team culture grounded in low ego and high curiosity where the best ideas win.
Design System and Operations
- Protect ownership of the design system so it accelerates every squad instead of competing for owner hours.
Brand and External Presence
- Own how ai71 looks to the world: brand, website, and the feel of everything put in front of a buyer.
- Hire and manage a brand designer.
- Partner with Product Marketing (who own the story) and Demand (who take it to market) so product, website, and brand feel like one company.
Cross-functional Collaboration
- Work daily with Product, Engineering, Product Marketing, Demand, and Deployments.
- Report to the Head of Product.
- Work in the open: share decisions and discussion on shared channels rather than direct messages so the whole team and AI agents can learn from them.
Specialized Design Considerations
- Design for environments most designers never see: on-prem and air-gapped deployments, sovereign clouds, multi-lingual and right-to-left interfaces, and buyers betting real operations on agent work.
- Build constraint-aware design practice where these factors shape the product from the first design decision onwards.
Qualifications & Experience
- 10+ years in design.
- Led teams at strong product companies.
- Continued to make the work yourself throughout your career.
- Built or stewarded a design system that other people ship faster because of.
- Portfolio demonstrating obsession at the detail level; ability to defend every pixel.
- Daily use of AI tools including coding agents and image-generation models, with artefacts proving they have already changed how you design.
- Brand experience alongside product is a strong plus.
- Arabic language is a strong plus.
- Agentic or AI-product design experience is a strong plus.
- Experience designing for enterprise and regulated buyers is a strong plus.
Skills & Competencies
- Craft: You live in the details, notice what is slightly off before anyone else, and it bothers you until it is fixed.
- Builder: You can point to things that would not exist without you and you are still making them; side projects count, particularly ones you kept going long after the first weekend.
- Magnet: Designers who have worked with you follow you; references light up when your name comes up.
- Coach: People do their best work under you and can say precisely what you changed about how they work.
- Partner: You work well in a leadership group, share context early, argue in the open, take other leaders' constraints seriously, and back the joint call once it is made.
Additional Information
- Contract type: Full-time
- Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE, onsite
- Relocation: Supported
- Annual leave: 26 working days
- Maternity leave: 120 calendar days at 100% pay
- Residence visas: Provided for employee and family (married partner and children)
- Health insurance: Daman Gold for employee and sponsored dependents
- Annual flight ticket: Provided for employee and sponsored dependents to country of their passport
- Education allowance: Up to AED 40,000 per annum per child, for a maximum of three children and to the age of 18 years
- Annual bonus: 30% of annual salary
- Income tax: 0% for most nationalities; exceptions apply for nationals of certain countries including the USA and Norway
- Remote work: 6 weeks remote working in the year
- Office provisions: Breakfast and lunch provided