Job Description

The role

HackerRank is hiring a Head of Design to define and own the experience for our platform and lead the organization responsible for delivering it. You will guide both traditional product experiences and emerging AI-native and agentic experiences, through a team of product designers and design managers.

As a member of Product, Engineering, and Design Leadership, you will serve as a strategic leader in the company. This role requires executive range and practitioner instincts. You should be able to move from an organizational question to a product strategy discussion, then into a working prototype or detailed interaction review without losing the thread between them. All of our leaders are builders.

What you will own

• Set experience strategy. Define the design vision for HackerRank’s platform and turn company strategy into a clear experience direction. Connect near-term product decisions to a coherent view of where technical hiring and developer skills are going. Keep the organization close to customers and developers, using research, product data, prototypes, and direct observation to shape the work.
• Drive AI and agentic fluency. Shape how people interact with AI across the platform, from embedded intelligence to autonomous agents. Establish rigor around AI experience evals, agentic specifications, and emerging interaction practices. Set the expectation that designers experiment with models, agents, and code-adjacent tools—and model that behavior yourself.
• Be the quality bar. Raise the quality and coherence of HackerRank’s end-to-end experience. Guide the information architecture, workflows, interaction patterns, and systems that make the platform feel like one product. Have a clear point of view on what good looks like, make that standard practical, and raise the quality of everything HackerRank ships.Drive strategic partnership. Operate as a peer to Product and Engineering leadership. Shape product strategy, investment priorities, and roadmaps; clarify the problems worth solving; and make the trade-offs required to balance customer value, technical reality, speed, and long-term platform quality.Build and lead the team. Lead an organization that includes product designers and design managers. Hire and develop strong leaders, establish clear ownership, raise the quality of critique and decision-making, and create an environment where designers can move quickly without lowering the bar.

How you will lead

We expect you to get close to the work. You see yourself as a maker who can lead others through ambiguity, and you proactively spend time building with models and agents and shipping your work.

You do not need to be a production engineer. You do need enough technical curiosity and fluency to prototype alongside engineers, explore ideas with modern AI and coding tools, and understand how model behavior, architecture, latency, cost, data, and evaluation shape the experience.

You should be comfortable developing your own perspective on the product and market. You can communicate that perspective clearly to non-designers and build support for improvements across the experience, from broad product strategy to the smallest interaction details.

You have led senior designers and design managers, and you know how to raise the quality of the work without slowing the team down. Build early. Put ideas in front of customers. Learn from real behavior. Refine from evidence.

Requirements and experience we are looking for

• A portfolio or body of work that demonstrates strong judgment, leadership, and high-quality execution. Show us what shipped, what changed, and the role you played.
• Significant product design experience, including ownership of complex products or platforms and several years leading designers and design managers.
• A track record of building and developing strong design organizations, including hiring senior talent, coaching managers, clarifying ownership, and improving the overall caliber of the team.
• Experience partnering with senior Product and Engineering leaders to shape strategy, prioritize investments, and turn ambiguous opportunities into shipped products.
• Direct experience delivering AI-powered products, agentic experiences, or other non-deterministic systems.
• A hands-on approach. You enjoy getting into the work, making ideas tangible, and helping teams ship stronger results.
• Fluency with modern design and prototyping tools, including demonstrated use of AI, code-adjacent tools, or working software to explore and communicate ideas. Framer experience is a plus.