SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Fuel50 is a workforce transformation platform combining skills intelligence, talent marketplace experiences, and responsible AI to help organizations understand workforce capability, build skills, and enable internal mobility.
You will lead and develop the product design team as a senior player-coach, staying close to the work while setting direction and shaping product strategy. This is a leadership trio role working closely with Product and Engineering leadership, influencing decisions across the organization to build products that are simple, trusted, and valuable.
Key responsibilities:
- Lead, manage, and coach product designers, supporting their growth and development
- Set and communicate a clear product design vision across skills intelligence, talent mobility, and AI-powered experiences
- Own design direction by spotting opportunities, forming points of view, and prototyping ideas
- Bring strategic perspective to senior conversations, challenge assumptions constructively, and influence cross-business decisions
- Partner with Product and Engineering from discovery through delivery, balancing customer value, design quality, technical reality, and pace
- Design human-centered AI experiences with appropriate trust, explainability, user control, and clear handoffs (including agent and assistant experiences across Fuel50 platform, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot)
- Grow design engineering capability and build/ship working prototypes or code yourself
- Evolve design system, accessibility standards (WCAG compliance), and design-to-code practices
- Shape design team structure, capability, hiring, planning, and ways of working as the organization evolves
Fuel50's team is fully remote with headquarters in New Zealand and team members across five countries. They have a co-working space in Takapuna, Auckland used occasionally for team meetings and strategic planning. The company offers flexible work times, remote work support, and a progressive parental leave policy.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of product design experience in SaaS or technology environments
- At least 2 years leading, managing, or coaching designers with a track record of building healthy, high-performing teams
- Strong product design craft across discovery, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, research, and shipped digital products
- Experience designing complex, connected systems and journeys for multiple personas, ideally in enterprise or B2B products
- Ability to think big and set compelling vision while staying pragmatic about what can be learned and shipped next
- Ability to originate ideas and direction, communicating them clearly through stories, prototypes, and design narrative
- Confidence working with experienced senior stakeholders and influencing through clarity, judgment, and strong communication
- Experience working closely with Product and Engineering as a genuine cross-functional trio
- Technical fluency and willingness to get into code; comfortable building working prototypes using HTML, CSS, JavaScript or similar; experience contributing code that shipped to production (front-end changes, design system components via pull requests)
- Hands-on experience using AI coding and design tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) to prototype faster and ship real work
- Working knowledge of accessibility and WCAG; experience designing to WCAG standards, testing for it, and building accessibility into design system and review process
- Interest in design systems and data-informed decision-making
- Must hold relevant right to work in New Zealand (Citizenship or work visa) at time of application
- Portfolio required with application
