Design Director

Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE (onsite). Type: Full-time. Relocation supported.

About ai71

ai71 builds enterprise-grade AI for the organisations that underpin the real economy: governments, banks, and large enterprises. We're rooted in the Middle East and Africa, where the demands on us are at their highest: sovereignty, on-prem, multi-lingual, and real regulatory weight. Those same demands are arriving everywhere, and what holds up here travels. Our work is grounded in a commitment to deploying AI securely, responsibly, and at scale.

Our flagship product is Ask, our agentic AI platform. It puts AI agents to work on an organisation's own knowledge, systems, and workflows: agents that reason through complexity, draw on the organisation's collective knowledge, and complete real work rather than just answer questions. Ask is infrastructure agnostic and model agnostic, so it runs inside a customer's existing stack and security perimeter, or in sovereign clouds, instead of forcing them onto ours. Today it's deployed across knowledge-heavy functions (legal, finance, HR, procurement) in some of the most regulated environments in the world: government entities, financial institutions, and industrial groups, primarily in the UAE and North Africa.

Role overview

We build Ask in squads: roughly a PM, three or four engineers, and a designer, each owning a slice of the product end-to-end and shipping it. Our design team is small today (two full-time designers and two contractors), with a design system that already carries real weight in how we ship.

What the team needs now is a leader, and this is a player-coach role, in that order. You'll design every week, own surfaces yourself, and set the bar with your own work. Around that, you'll give the team structure, ways of working, and a coach worth following.

AI is rewriting what the job of a designer is, and we want the person leading design here to be pushing that boundary personally: prototyping in working code, exploring ten directions where two used to be affordable, and rebuilding how the team works around what the tools now make possible.

Your mandate runs wider than product design. How ai71 looks to the world (the brand, the website, the feel of everything we put in front of a buyer) belongs to you too.

What you'll do

Design, weekly. You'll own surfaces of Ask yourself, ship them, and sit in the work side by side with the team. Your portfolio stays live here. If a month passes without you making something, the role has drifted.

Raise the craft. This is a craft mandate, pursued through example and coaching rather than a review gate. You'll set what excellent looks like on the platform's core surfaces, run crits people show up for, and make each designer measurably better at the details.

Push what design becomes with AI. We expect our Design Director to be genuinely dangerous with an AI coding agent, whichever one you like, because that's how this team ships. You'll make working-code prototypes the team's default artefact, multiply how many directions get explored before a call is made, and keep adapting how the team works as the tools change under everyone's feet.

Give the team structure. Ways of working, clear ownership, careers that grow without forcing anyone into management. The design system deserves protected ownership so it accelerates every squad instead of competing for its owner's hours.

Own how ai71 looks to the world. You'll hire and manage a brand designer, and partner with Product Marketing (who own the story) and Demand (who take it to market) so that the product, the website, and the brand feel like one company.

Coach seniors without capping them. Part of the team is very senior and wants to stay hands-on. Your job is to make them better and give them room, and to be the kind of leader other strong designers move companies for.

Design for environments most designers never see. On-prem and air-gapped deployments, sovereign clouds, multi-lingual and right-to-left interfaces, buyers betting real operations on agent work. These constraints shape the product from the first design decision onwards.

The team

Ask is around 60 engineers, five PMs, and four designers, from tier-1 product companies (DeepMind, Google, Amazon, Apple), a few other unicorns, and tier-1 strategy firms including McKinsey QuantumBlack and BCG X. The design team reports to you, and you report to the Head of Product. You'll work daily with Product, Engineering, Product Marketing, Demand, and Deployments.

How we work

Low ego, high curiosity. The best ideas win here, not the loudest voices. We approach problems with humility, ask better questions, and stay genuinely open to being wrong. That's how a small team learns fast enough to stay ahead of a field that resets every few weeks, and it's why you'll change your mind in the open here and be respected for it.

We work in the open. Decisions and discussion happen on shared channels rather than in DMs, so the whole team can learn from them, and so can the AI agents we build on top of them.

Who you are

You bring 10+ years in design, you've led teams at strong product companies, and you never stopped making the work yourself. Your portfolio shows obsession at the detail level and you can defend any pixel in it. You've built or stewarded a design system that other people ship faster because of. You use AI tools every day, coding agents and image-generation models included, and they've already changed how you design; you have the artefacts to prove it. Brand experience alongside product is a strong plus, as is Arabic, agentic or AI-product design, or time designing for enterprise and regulated buyers.

Beyond experience, here's what we look for:

Craft: The details are where you live. You notice what's slightly off before anyone else does, and it bothers you until it's fixed.

Builder: You can point to things that wouldn't exist without you, and you're still making them. Side projects count too, particularly the ones you kept going long after the first weekend.

Magnet: Designers who've 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. You share context early, argue in the open, take the other leaders' constraints seriously, and back the joint call once it's made.

Many strong candidates won't tick every box above. If your experience looks a little different but you believe you can bring value, we'd love to hear from you.

Benefits

• Annual leave - 26 working days

• Maternity leave - 120 calendar days at 100% pay

• Residence Visas - For you and your family (married partner and children)

• Health insurance - (Daman Gold) for employee and sponsored dependents

• Annual flight ticket - For employee and sponsored dependents to country of their passport

• Education allowance - Up to AED 40K per annum, per child for a max of 3 children and to the age of 18 years

• Annual bonus - 30% of annual salary
  Taxation: 0% income tax for most nationalities (exceptions apply for nationals of certain countries, including the USA and Norway)

• Remote work - 6 weeks remote working in the year

• Breakfast and lunch provided in the office