Director UX Design

JOB DESCRIPTION

About HelloFresh

HelloFresh Group reaches more than 6 million customers across 16 markets through a portfolio of 8 consumer brands — from meal kits and ready-to-eat meals to pet food and specialty products. HelloTech, our global technology division, builds the digital consumer experience across Berlin, Warsaw, and North America: the apps, the personalization, the discovery moments, and everything in between that turns food into something people genuinely look forward to.

Design is core to how we compete. Our Consumer UX team designs end-to-end experiences across all 8 brands, and we hold a high quality bar — internally, our “zest-appeal” framework defines design excellence from baseline usability through to best-in-class, surprise-and-delight craft. We are also moving fast to an AI-native way of working, where AI rethinks discovery, prototyping, and the path from design to code. Experience quality and innovation are leadership priorities all the way to the group president.

About the role

This year we are doubling down on craft, execution, and design leadership. In a world where it is easier than ever to get software to 75% built, it is the last 25% — the polish, the motion, the detail customers actually feel — that decides whether a consumer experience is merely useful or genuinely loved. Millions of people open our apps every week to feed themselves and their families; the final 10% is the difference between a transaction and a habit.

This is a build-and-scale role, not a maintenance one. We are hiring a design leader to own a consumer experience domain within the Consumer mega alliance, raise the quality bar across it, grow a high-performing team, and build the design-technology and AI-native capability that turns ambitious ideas into beautifully executed, shipped products. We need a maker and a leader who leads through the work — not a strategy-only or people-management-only role.

The level — Director or Senior Director — will be set by the candidate’s experience and the final scope of the domain. We are open to both.

What You’ll Do: The Recipe

• Lead from the front. Lead, coach, and inspire a multidisciplinary team — UX, UI, content, and localization — across multiple consumer surfaces. Stay hands-on in the work: review designs, jump into critiques, and drive clarity.
• Turn ambiguity into clarity. Solve problems from first principles, not templates. Help your team make hard decisions, focus on outcomes over process, and install just the right amount of structure and rigour to ship great work at speed.
• Set and uphold an extremely high craft bar. From UX flow to polished UI — layout, typography, motion, micro-interaction, and visual storytelling. Be the design-quality amplifier who notices the details others miss and pushes work to where it needs to be, coaching the team to our quality tenets.
• Own a consumer experience domain end-to-end. Take accountability for the quality and delivery of experiences across the customer journey, from problem framing to shipped product across our brands and 16 markets. Drive design excellence through every detail.
• Build design-technology capability. Champion and scale our design system (Zest) and modern UI foundations. Close the gap between design and engineering through prototyping, design-to-code workflows, and component quality — making design and engineering faster together.
• Make us AI-native. Treat AI as an active part of how design gets done — accelerating discovery, generating and validating prototypes, and shortening design-to-delivery. Define the quality bar AI-assisted workflows must meet, and help the company rewrite how consumer products get built in the AI era.
• Partner deeply with Product and Engineering. Align on priorities, make tradeoffs, unblock delivery, and move fast. Advocate clearly and persistently for the right experience, and raise the ambition of the partners around you.

What You’ll Bring: The Ingredients

• Team leadership. A track record of leading and growing high-performing design teams in product-first, consumer (B2C) companies — hiring, coaching, and developing designers at all levels, from IC to managers.
• High agency. You thrive in ambiguous, fast-changing environments, push for the right solution rather than the convenient one, and lean in to make things happen without waiting for permission.
• A bias to ship. Demonstrated success driving teams to ship great software at scale, not just making decks about it — owning execution across a product line and a portfolio of features.
• Exceptional craft and product taste. Strong visual and interaction sensibility and a high personal bar for detail. You know what great looks like for a consumer audience, and you can help teams get there — across hierarchy, motion, and micro-interaction.
• Design-technologist mindset. Fluency at the design–engineering boundary: design systems, component architecture, prototyping in code or advanced tools, and a practical grasp of front-end constraints.
• AI-native practice. You already use AI across the design workflow — for insight synthesis, rapid prototyping, and design-to-code — and have a point of view on scaling it responsibly with a high quality bar. Fluency with tools like Figma, Claude, and similar is expected.
• Scale and systems thinking. Experience designing and maintaining quality across a multi-brand or multi-market consumer ecosystem, balancing consistency with brand-specific character.

What Success Looks Like

• Your team consistently delivers high-quality consumer product work at speed.
• You have hired exceptional talent and helped your existing team grow in craft and execution maturity.
• Experience quality in your domain is visibly higher — the last 10% is sweated, and it shows in what customers feel.
• Product and engineering leaders love partnering with you because you unlock progress and raise the ambition.
• Design systems and AI-native workflows in your domain make the whole team faster without sacrificing craft.
• You are a key player in shaping how HelloFresh builds consumer product in the AI era — writing new playbooks, not following old ones.

What We Offer: The Toppings

• Scale and impact. Shape experiences for 6+ million customers across 8 brands and 16 markets.
• A craft-and-AI-first culture. Leadership that champions experience quality, innovation, and AI-native ways of working from the top of the organization.
• Real ownership. End-to-end accountability for your domain, with the autonomy to set and raise the bar.
• Growth. A defined leadership track and the chance to expand scope as the alliance scales.
• Global collaboration. Work with experienced product, engineering, and design partners across HelloTech’s international teams.