SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
n8n is an open-source workflow orchestration platform for AI agents and automation, with 650,000+ active developers, 190K+ GitHub stars, and a $5.2bn valuation. The company is scaling from a beloved open-source project into a major B2B platform, with 260+ employees across Europe and the US, centered in Berlin.
You will lead the Product Design team, developing designers, raising the quality of design work, and ensuring design has real influence on product direction. This is a pure management role—not a player-coach position and not a first management role. You'll manage a team spanning product designers, design engineers, and user researchers at various seniority levels across product areas, working alongside another design manager and reporting to the VP of Product (until a Head of Design joins).
The core design challenge: n8n is widening from a developer audience to a broader set of builders, with 80%+ of workflows involving AI agents. Your team sits at the center of this shift.
Key responsibilities:
- Lead and develop the team through high-quality 1:1s, coaching, performance management, and career progression framework evolution
- Raise the design bar by setting standards for problem framing, user understanding, interaction design, information architecture, and visual craft; run critiques that measurably improve work
- Own the whole product experience by maintaining a holistic view across features, identifying inconsistencies and UX problems, and addressing fragmentation systematically
- Make design a real partner by working closely with Product and Engineering leadership so design contributes early to problem definition, not late to execution
- Improve how the team collaborates, critiques, and shares knowledge
You'll stay close to the craft through critiques and reviews, and occasionally pick up design work yourself (exploratory concepts, gaps during leave, first-pass problems)—but this is not a 50/50 split with delivery work.
REQUIREMENTS
Must-haves:
- 3+ years of proven design management in product-led technology companies, managing a team of five or more product designers. This is not a first management role.
- Demonstrated ability to run effective 1:1s, evidence-based performance reviews, and difficult feedback conversations. Experience building or improving career progression frameworks for designers.
- Track record of coaching and mentoring designers who got measurably better or grew in scope while reporting to you. Ability to run critiques that change the work.
- Strong design taste and judgment; designers trust your read on quality. You can articulate what separates adequate from excellent design and step into design work directly when needed.
- Consistent success hiring designers. You know where good design talent is, how to attract it, and can assess candidates quickly.
- Hands-on AI fluency: you use AI tools in your own work and in how your team designs. You have an informed view on designing AI-enabled products. (AI agents are core to the product, so this is not optional.)
Nice-to-haves:
- Experience managing design teams in B2B SaaS, developer tools, workflow automation, or similarly technical products
- Technical mindset: genuine curiosity about APIs, webhooks, data structures, and how workflows execute (no coding required)
- Experience designing products for developers, technical operators, or sophisticated users
- Systems view: ability to spot patterns and UX problems across a broader product experience
- Influence without authority: ability to bring Product and Engineering peers along through reasoning
- Experience scaling design teams through rapid company growth
- Experience managing designers in remote-first or highly distributed organizations
- Open-source or community-driven product experience
- Track record of meaningfully broadening design team diversity through hiring
