Associate Director - Product Designer

Associate Director – Product Design (High - IC)

We're hiring a Lead Product Designer (IC) to set the design direction for CarDekho's consumer experience — search & discovery, listing pages and transaction flows used by millions of buyers and sellers every month. This is a hands-on role with org-wide reach. You will define the design system, the quality bar and the AI-native way of working that every product squad builds on.

You'll be the design counterpart to Product and Engineering leadership on the highest-stakes problems: unifying a fragmented multi-brand, multi-platform experience, raising conversion across the buying funnel, and making design move at the speed of AI-assisted delivery.

What You'll Own

Design Vision & Experience Strategy

• Set the multi-year design vision for CarDekho's consumer surfaces across Web, Android and iOS, and translate it into a sequenced roadmap Product and Engineering can commit to.
• Own the end-to-end experience of the core buying funnel — search, discovery, comparison, listings, lead and transaction flows — and the coherence across brands (CarDekho, BikeDekho, Zigwheels and others).
• Lead the hardest design problems directly, from framing and research through high-fidelity delivery, rather than only reviewing others work.

Design System as Infrastructure

• Architect the design system as a product: tokens, atomic components, theming for multiple brands, and parity across Web, Android, and iOS.
• Define governance at scale—contribution model, versioning, deprecation, and adoption metrics—so every squad builds on one foundation.
• Make build-vs-reuse calls with engineering leads, balancing speed, performance, and long-term maintainability.

AI-Native Design Practice

• Define how the design org works with AI — Claude, Cursor or similar agentic tools as the primary workflow for scaffolding, prototyping, documentation and consistency audits.
• Build AI-augmented system tooling: automated token and component audits, generated documentation, and design-to-code pipelines that cut handoff time.
• Prototype and validate at 10x speed, moving the team from manual pixel-pushing to architectural decisions and pattern generation.

Quality Bar & Outcomes

• Own the visual and interaction standard—pixel-perfect, performant, and accessible by default (WCAG built into the system, not added later).
• Drive measurable impact on high-traffic surfaces using funnel metrics, experiments, and user research; iterate post-launch until the numbers move.

Influencing

• Raise the craft of the whole design team through critiques, design principles, pattern libraries, and 1:1 mentorship of senior designers.
• Represent design in leadership forums, articulating rationale and tradeoffs to product, engineering, and business heads.
• Shape hiring and the design career ladder as a bar-raiser in interviews and portfolio reviews.

What We Expect You to Bring

• 8–14+ years in product design, with a portfolio showing high-fidelity visual craft, complex interaction design, and systems thinking at the highest IC level (Principal / Staff / Lead).
• Built or scaled at least one design system from the ground up in a high-traffic B2C marketplace or e-commerce product, across web and native mobile.
• Demonstrated business impact — design work you led that measurably moved conversion, engagement, or retention metrics.
• AI-augmented design fluency as a daily standard: using Claude, Cursor or similar agentic tools for scaffolding, prototyping, debugging design logic and scaling the system — and teaching others to do the same.
• Expert-level Figma — auto-layout, variants, variables/tokens and library governance across many teams.
• Influence without authority: a track record of setting direction for designers, PMs and engineers who don't report to you.
• Exceptional communication of design rationale and technical tradeoffs to senior Product, Engineering and Business leaders.
• Public contributions to the design community: talks, writing or open-source design systems.