Director, Product Design

Director, Product Design

Make Your Mark:

BlackLine is building the AI-native platform for autonomous finance: configure once, let agents execute the workflow, and have people review the exceptions. As Director, Product Design, you will set and evangelize the design vision and strategy for the BlackLine platform, and you will define what trusted AI looks and feels like for the accountants, controllers, and finance leaders who sign their name to the numbers our products produce.This is a hands-on leadership role in a deliberately lean design organization, where leverage comes from systems rather than layers. You will coach a small senior team and own headcount, budget, and tooling strategy. You will represent design in senior leadership forums, translating business goals into design strategy and back again, and you will be accountable for business outcomes: activation and adoption of AI-assisted workflows, retention and expansion, usability, and the trust our users place in what the system does on their behalf.The people this role designs for put their professional judgment behind every AI-assisted output, and you are expected to hold that reality as a design input, not a research footnote. Visual craft matters, but the primary craft is systems and interaction design: how the product behaves under uncertainty, how it recovers from errors, and how trust is built.

You'll Get To:

• Design Vision & Strategy: Set and evangelize a forward-looking design vision for the BlackLine platform, tied explicitly to company objectives and core business metrics. Sequence the highest-value experience bets and make them legible to executives, engineers, and customers alike.
• Business & Market Outcomes: Operate as a UX strategist across the product ecosystem, not a design service function. Work closely with cross-functional teams and customers to establish a point of view on where the market and our competitors are heading, and let that POV guide how you connect design decisions to activation, adoption, retention, and expansion, and how you make the case for investment in those terms.
• Systems-Level Diagnosis & Pattern Design: Take a systems view of the whole ecosystem, not just the design system. Identify where our highest-traffic experiences are underperforming and why, then define a small set of durable patterns that fix them in the AI era and scale across surfaces.
• Trusted AI Experiences: Own the patterns that make agentic finance software trustworthy: transparency into what an agent did and why, explainability of results, confidence and materiality thresholds, human-in-the-loop review and approval, graceful correction and override, and audit-ready traceability, including the language and tone the system uses to explain itself. Defend why this level of transparency, this threshold, and this wording earns our users' trust.
• New Patterns for Agentic Governance: Steering, pausing, and auditing fleets of autonomous financial agents at enterprise scale has no pattern library to borrow from. Prototype and test novel interaction models rather than adapting enterprise SaaS convention.
• Customer & Domain Insight: Work closely with our research and digital experience teams to learn from their research, user data analysis, and feedback insights, and leverage that to establish yourself as a recognized voice of the finance and accounting user. Translate close, controllership, and audit realities into design decisions.
• Team, Tooling & Operations: Lead and grow the design team, owning headcount, mentorship, and budget. Reimagine tooling for an AI-driven development lifecycle: prompt-based rapid prototyping, a design system wired into engineer-ready front-end code, and a shorter path from concept to shipped experience.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science, AI/ML, and GTM leaders to shape product strategy and investment decisions, and represent BlackLine design externally with customers and partners.
• Quality & Measurable Improvement: Establish the standards, critique practices, and success metrics for the portfolio. Design so that user behavior, corrections, overrides, escalations, and dismissals feeds measurable improvement in the AI, not just the interface.
• Your First Year: We invest more in ramp than in resumes. Expect deep onboarding into our products, customers, and the close process, paired with clear ownership from day one: by month six, a diagnosed view of our weakest high-traffic experiences, a POV on our activation and adoption gaps, and pattern work underway to close them.

What You'll Bring:

Experience & Business Judgment

• 12-15+ years of product design experience, with a minimum of 5+ years in a leadership role managing a team.
• Bachelor's degree required; experience building AI-native finance, accounting, or related SaaS software highly preferred.
• Demonstrated success setting design vision for a significant product line, and the ability to influence executives with business reasoning, not design rationale alone.
• Commercial fluency in enterprise SaaS: comfort with activation, adoption, retention, expansion, and margin, and the habit of framing design work in those terms.
• High agency and sound business judgment. Moves fast under incomplete information, makes the call, and owns the result rather than waiting for direction or consensus.
• A track record of scaling design culture, systems, and operations in a rapidly changing environment.
• A portfolio is welcome but secondary. What matters is evidence of shipped AI experiences and the business results they produced; polished case studies without outcomes will not move the conversation forward.
• High fluency with the modern toolchain (Figma and Figma Make, Claude, Storybook, Supernova or equivalents) and with front-end languages such as HTML, CSS, and React, plus a point of view on using both to drive operational efficiency.

Building Trusted AI for Finance and Accounting

• Direct experience designing AI-powered or agentic products, ideally in a regulated, high-consequence domain where being wrong is expensive.
• Fluency in the design problems specific to trust: explainability, provenance of source data, confidence communication, human-in-the-loop approval, exception handling, reversibility, and auditability, including the tone and voice that make an agent's explanations credible to a finance professional.
• Ability to partner deeply with Data Science and AI engineering, understanding model capabilities and limits well enough to design honestly around them.
• A point of view on responsible, human-centered AI and on balancing automation with user accountability.
• Working knowledge of enterprise finance and accounting workflows, or the demonstrated ability to build that depth quickly; familiarity with compliance and audit expectations is an advantage.

Leadership & Influence

• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills, with a proven ability to align cross-functional partners and influence decisions with data and narrative.
• Drives momentum in ambiguous problem spaces without waiting for perfect clarity, and is trusted as an advisor by senior leadership and cross-functional peers.

Thrive at BlackLine Because You Are Joining:

• A technology-based company with a sense of adventure and a vision for the future. Every door at BlackLine is open. Just bring your brains, your problem-solving skills, and be part of a winning team at the world's most trusted name in Finance Automation!
• A culture that is kind, open, and accepting. It's a place where people can embrace what makes them unique, and the mix of cultural backgrounds and varying interests cultivates diverse thought and perspectives.
• A culture where BlackLiner's continued growth and learning is empowered. BlackLine offers a wide variety of professional development seminars and inclusive affinity groups to celebrate and support our diversity.

BlackLine is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, age, religious creed, national origin, physical or mental disability, ancestry, color, marital status, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, status as a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking, medical condition, genetic information, or any other protected class or category recognized by applicable equal employment opportunity or other similar laws.

BlackLine recognizes that the ways we work and the workplace itself has shifted. We innovate in a workplace that optimizes a combination of virtual and in-person interactions to maximize collaboration and nurture our culture. Candidates who live within a reasonable commute to one of our offices will work in the office at least 3 days a week.

Salary Range:

$257,000.00-$322,000.00

Pay Transparency Statement:

Placement within this range depends upon several factors, including the applicant's prior relevant job experience, skill set, and geographic location.

In addition to base pay, BlackLine also offers short-term and long-term incentive programs, based