Design Leader
One slot, no understudy. The design leader usually costs more than anyone else on your clipboard, and burning a third of the 400,000-follower cap on a single kid forces honest math on every pick after. Read the takes and vibes columns before you fall in love with a craft score. A leader who can't get six strangers pulling the same direction isn't leading anything.
Off the fence, the title reads Head of Design, Design Director, or VP of Design. The day job is hiring, critique, keeping the quality bar where it belongs, and translating between the design team and the executives who pay for it. The good ones never drift so far from the work that they stop noticing a bad flow. That instinct is the thing to scout for in the pool below.
Free agents: 60 available
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Julie Zhuo@joulee
Design LeaderWent from intern to VP of design at Facebook across thirteen years, then wrote the book most new managers get handed.
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Soren Iverson@soren_iverson
Design LeaderDesigner behind the daily unhinged app concepts and co-creator of Stompers, the step counter where friends can hit each other with cartoon…
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Benji Taylor@benjitaylor
Design LeaderHead of design at X, which makes him the man sanding down a decade of accumulated design debt one screen at a time.
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Soleio@soleio
Design LeaderAn early Facebook designer who went on to Dropbox, now an angel investor.
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Ammaar Reshi@ammaar
Design LeaderLeads product and design for Google AI Studio, where he rebuilt the thing from the ground up and shipped its vibe-coding experience.
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Ben South@bnj
Product DesignerBuilding Variant, after a VP run at Postmates and two companies that got acquired.
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Andy Allen@asallen
Design LeaderFounded Not Boring Software to put play and craft back into everyday apps, after co-founding FiftyThree and helping make Paper.
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Jared Erondu@erondu
Design LeaderHeads design at Span, after running design and marketing at Lattice.
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Hannah Ahn@hannah_ahn
Design LeaderHead of design and media at Superpower, a title that bundles product design and content into one job most companies split in two.
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David Hoang@davidhoang
Design LeaderVP of Design at Atlassian by way of Replit, Webflow, and One Medical.
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Paul Stamatiou@Stammy
Design LeaderHead of Design at Sesame after nine years drawing Twitter’s camera, composer and threads, with a stop co-founding Limitless before Meta…
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Katarina Batina@katarinabatina
Design LeaderVP of Design at Shopify, which means the commerce surfaces a large slice of the internet checks out through eventually run past her.
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Nick Chella@nickbakeddesign
Design LeaderRuns Baked, the product design agency for founders, after Meta, Netflix, and Expa.
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Dan Mall@danmall
Design LeaderRan the design-systems consultancy SuperFriendly for a decade and sold it, wrote the book on making systems scale, and now teaches agency…
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Evil Rabbit@evilrabbit_
Design LeaderVercel's founding designer since 2016 and now its creative studio director, which makes that severe black-and-white aesthetic something of…
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Jenny Wen@jenny_wen
Design LeaderRedesigned Claude and set the vision for Cowork at Anthropic, then left this July to run design at Cursor.
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Josh Puckett@joshpuckett
Design LeaderLed design at Dropbox, Wealthfront and Groupon before co-founding Iteration.
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Katie Dill@lil_dill
Design LeaderHead of Design at Stripe, from checkout flows to the Stripe Press hardcovers on your shelf.
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Grace Walker@graceongrid
Design LeaderCreative director at Spellbook after years as a Webflow-wielding independent in Calgary.
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Cory Watilo@watilo
Product DesignerLead designer at PostHog, where he owns the entire website and calls himself the webmaster without irony.
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Finn McKenty@thefinnmckenty
Design LeaderMarketer, designer, and fractional CMO at Brotege after a 750,000-subscriber run as The Punk Rock MBA.
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Danny Trinh@dtrinh
Design LeaderDirector of product design at Meta, after building social products at Snap, Zenly, Sensei, Free, Path, and Digg.
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Steve Lauda@stevelauda_
Design LeaderRuns Blissful Studio, doing full-stack design and development for early-stage companies from Singapore.
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Jorn van Dijk@jornvandijk
Design LeaderCo-founded Framer and still runs it, with Festina alongside.
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Jessica Strelioff@jstrelioff
Design LeaderBrand designer and creative director leading Goodside, the independent Austin studio working across strategy, identity, art direction,…
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Lucas Crespo@lucas__crespo
Brand DesignerDescribes the job as putting lipstick on capitalism, which after creative directing at Every, VML and BBDO New York he has more than earned…
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Drew Wilson@drewwilson
Design LeaderFounder of Opacity and the person behind ValioCon, the conference.
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Alex Aperios@AlexAperios
Design LeaderCreative director behind Aperios Design, giving founder-led companies the identity upgrade they need after the first one stops fitting.
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Wes Bancroft@WesleyBancroft
Design LeaderRuns the brand studio Lunour and talks about identity work alongside life as a dad of nine.
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Jordan Jenkins@jkane
Design LeaderWelsh designer and director, founder of Outland and builder of Tagteam.
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Lee Black@mrblackstudio
Design LeaderDüsseldorf designer with 25-plus years in the work, running 1042 Studio and a small constellation of tools, components, guidelines, and…
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Shane Levine@theShaneLevine
Design LeaderFounder of Turbo, the Brooklyn product design studio that stays with startups for the long haul.
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Henry Modisett@henrymodis
Design LeaderFormer VP of design at Perplexity, and its founding designer.
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Meaghan Choi@meaghaneschoi
Design LeaderLeads design for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic — the agent surfaces, not the chat window.
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Marvin Schwaibold@MSchwaibold
Design LeaderCo-founded Molly, sold it to Shopify, and the whole team became the in-house Product Design Studio.
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Seb Cornelius@SebCornelius
Design LeaderIndependent London designer and creative director with more than a decade across product, identity, and digital work.
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Nev Flynn@NevFlynn
Design LeaderLeads design and engineering at ElevenLabs, by way of Evervault, whose site designers kept reverse-engineering rather than just asking him…
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Ian Silber@iansilber
Design LeaderHead of Product Design at OpenAI after eight years shaping Instagram and a stint at the game studio OpenAI bought.
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Jesse Showalter@imjesseshow
Design LeaderRuns Good Fight Creative and Design Champs after teaching a generation of designers through hundreds of YouTube lessons.
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Adrián Mato@adrianmg
Design LeaderDesign director on Copilot at GitHub, by way of Spain, the UK and the US.
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Ryan Miyoshi@ryry__mimi
Design LeaderHead of design at Column, a bank built for developers — which means the interface has to stay completely calm while it moves other people's…
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Grace Ling@gracepace_
Design LeaderFounder of Design Buddies, the global community she started as a student and grew past 150,000 members.
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Eve Bouffard@eve_bouff
Design LeaderHead of design at Y Combinator — or head of fun, going by the X bio, which is the kind of edit only someone genuinely good at the first job…
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Ryan Gilbert@rjgilbert
Design LeaderCreator of Workspaces, the weekly archive that has opened more than 500 real home offices to the internet — and photographed a surprising…
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Joel Lewenstein@joellewenstein
Design LeaderHead of design at Anthropic, which means owning the interface a great many people now talk to more often than they talk to some of their…
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Darrin Henein@darrinhenein
Design LeaderChief Design Officer at Owner, previously VP of Design at Shopify.
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George Hastings@soulegit
Design LeaderDesign engineer with fourteen-plus years across product and agency work at IDEO and AREA 17, now building Unicorn Studio and the color tool…
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Loredana Crisan@loredanacrisan
Design LeaderStarted piano at seven in Bucharest, taught by her mother, and trained as a classical musician before design.
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Ioana Teleanu@ioana_teleanu
Design LeaderPatent-holding AI and product designer documenting AI Design OS in public, after Miro and UiPath.
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Gui Seiz@guiseiz
Design LeaderDesign director for AI at Figma, Portuguese, and self-described as calm sad boi tinkering — which is the most honest job description…
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Emily Campbell@elou
Design LeaderVP of Design at HackerRank and creator of Shape of AI, the living catalog that names the patterns behind human-centered AI.
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Kevin Wong@kvwong
Design LeaderVP of Design at Webflow, steering its AI-native web vision after leading design at Messenger and Airbnb.
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Polly D'Arcy@pollyinthedart
Design LeaderVP of design at Wealthsimple, having gone from individual contributor to VP without ever changing companies — an arc rare enough that Dive…
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Sara Vienna@sravienna
Design LeaderChief Design Officer at MetaLab, leading research, strategy, product, and brand teams behind products from Slack to Midjourney and Windsurf.
