Experience Director (UX) - Future Freelance

Job description

*This role is fully remote. Candidates must be based in the United States or Canada.* **We are Fantasy.** For over two decades, we've partnered with the likes of Google, Microsoft, Nike, Spotify, and Peacock to build digital products used by billions of people every day. We're now entering our most ambitious chapter: designing and building the next generation of intelligent experiences, where AI isn’t a chatbox but the orchestrator of truly personal products and brand experiences. **Your Role.** As an Experience Director, you'll work alongside multidisciplinary teams to concept, prototype, and ship meaningful experiences for some of the world's most forward-thinking companies. At Fantasy, you won't just use AI tools. You'll help define how they get used, push what's possible, and set a new bar for what our discipline looks like at this moment. This is early, it's exciting, and it's wide open. We're not just designing products. We're actively shaping how AI transforms the craft of design itself and we want people who want to be in the middle of that. But more than a designer, we're looking for a leader, a thinker, a communicator, someone who has taken an idea from concept to shipped product, leading the charge from first idea to final release. Someone who can own and run a project end-to-end, rallying the right people, making the hard calls, and keeping the work moving forward. Someone who synthesizes user needs and business goals into tangible, specific design solutions, and can articulate that vision with clarity and conviction. Someone who's less interested in perfecting a process and more interested in building the future one. If you're excited to help define what great design looks like in the age of AI, this is the role for you. **Key Responsibilities.** - Set experiential direction and provide strategic guidance across the full arc of engagements, from ambiguous brief to final delivery, using AI tools to move faster, experiment more boldly, and push the work further. - Define and champion the principles that create great, human-centered products, and ensure teams execute against them with creativity and craft. - Oversee and direct work across complex, large-scale engagements as a hands-on leader with a meticulous eye for detail, ensuring it's realized with exceptional creativity and expert craftsmanship. - Distill complex, sometimes competing inputs, including user research, business strategy, technical constraints, and stakeholder feedback, into a clear design direction you can defend and ship. - Devise product visions, feature sets, and roadmaps that move businesses forward, articulating them through compelling, strategic narratives for clients and collaborators. - Build scalable design systems that combine delight and systematic thinking to deliver consistent, accessible, world-class experiences for global audiences. - Work across disciplines, including product, engineering, research, and strategy, to establish unified experiential approaches that balance user needs with business requirements. - Mentor, manage, and grow a team of UX designers, helping them advance their craft and accelerate their careers. - Spot opportunities to improve design processes and lead the team toward better, smarter ways of working, including defining how AI tools get used, pushing what's possible, and setting a new bar for the practice. - Lead by example, inspiring those around you to think beyond the ordinary and raise the standard of what great design looks like in the age of AI. - Engage directly with client partners, working with them to solve problems, ideate, and create meaningful digital experiences. - Lead client presentations, workshops, and working sessions with clarity, confidence, and a strong point of view, conveying the power and thinking behind your team's solutions. - Build trusted, lasting relationships with clients, becoming a natural go-to for creativity, problem solving, and strategic design thinking. - Own the full end-to-end process, from initial conversations with prospective clients through delivery, growth, and ongoing partnership. - Identify emerging shifts in tools, technology, and practice, and translate them into concrete changes in how the team works. **Experience and Skills.** - A portfolio demonstrating a range of digital product, service, or systems design work spanning a wide variety of industries and contexts. - 10+ years of experience in the design industry, with a meaningful focus on leading teams to create human-centered digital experiences at scale. - A proven ability to lead, mentor, and inspire designers to do the best work of their careers. - Thought leadership and strategic thinking that produce a strong, well-articulated point of view, and the ability to bring clients and collaborators along for it. - Ability to self-direct and independently drive the UX vision for a product or platform, from strategy through interaction design to shipped experience. - Hands-on familiarity with AI-powered design tools and genuine curiosity about where they're taking the craft. - A passion for continual practice and process improvement, with a track record of raising the bar for how teams work. - A meticulous eye for detail and strong design aesthetic sensibilities. - Continued awareness of design trends, emerging technologies, and innovation. - Exceptional communication, presentation, and facilitation skills. - A passion for people and a desire to build highly successful, enduring client relationships. - Commitment to inclusive, accessible, and equitable design practices. **Our Commitment.** Fantasy has been building diverse, inclusive teams since 1999. We believe the range of perspectives in this building is inseparable from the quality of what we ship. Fantasy is an Equal Opportunity Employer.