Associate Director - Product Designer

Associate Director – Product Design (High - IC)

We're hiring a Lead Product Designer (IC) to set the design direction for CarDekho's consumer experience — search & discovery, listing pages and transaction flows used by millions of buyers and sellers every month. This is a hands-on role with org-wide reach. You will define the design system, the quality bar and the AI-native way of working that every product squad builds on.

You'll be the design counterpart to Product and Engineering leadership on the highest-stakes problems: unifying a fragmented multi-brand, multi-platform experience, raising conversion across the buying funnel, and making design move at the speed of AI-assisted delivery.

What You'll OwnDesign Vision & Experience StrategySet the multi-year design vision for CarDekho's consumer surfaces across Web, Android and iOS, and translate it into a sequenced roadmap Product and Engineering can commit to.Own the end-to-end experience of the core buying funnel — search, discovery, comparison, listings, lead and transaction flows — and the coherence across brands (CarDekho, BikeDekho, Zigwheels and others).Lead the hardest design problems directly, from framing and research through high-fidelity delivery, rather than only reviewing others' work.Design System as InfrastructureArchitect the design system as a product: tokens, atomic components, theming for multiple brands, and parity across Web, Android, and iOS.Define governance at scale—contribution model, versioning, deprecation, and adoption metrics—so every squad builds on one foundation.Make build-vs-reuse calls with engineering leads, balancing speed, performance, and long-term maintainability.AI-Native Design PracticeDefine how the design org works with AI — Claude, Cursor or similar agentic tools as the primary workflow for scaffolding, prototyping, documentation and consistency audits.Build AI-augmented system tooling: automated token and component audits, generated documentation, and design-to-code pipelines that cut handoff time.Prototype and validate at 10x speed, moving the team from manual pixel-pushing to architectural decisions and pattern generation.Quality Bar & OutcomesOwn the visual and interaction standard—pixel-perfect, performant, and accessible by default (WCAG built into the system, not added later).Drive measurable impact on high-traffic surfaces using funnel metrics, experiments, and user research; iterate post-launch until the numbers move.Influencing Raise the craft of the whole design team through critiques, design principles, pattern libraries, and 1:1 mentorship of senior designers.Represent design in leadership forums, articulating rationale and tradeoffs to product, engineering, and business heads.Shape hiring and the design career ladder as a bar-raiser in interviews and portfolio reviews.

What We Expect You to Bring8–14+ years in product design, with a portfolio showing high-fidelity visual craft, complex interaction design, and systems thinking at the highest IC level (Principal / Staff / Lead).Built or scaled at least one design system from the ground up in a high-traffic B2C marketplace or e-commerce product, across web and native mobile.Demonstrated business impact — design work you led that measurably moved conversion, engagement, or retention metrics.AI-augmented design fluency as a daily standard: using Claude, Cursor or similar agentic tools for scaffolding, prototyping, debugging design logic and scaling the system — and teaching others to do the same.Expert-level Figma — auto-layout, variants, variables/tokens and library governance across many teams.Influence without authority: a track record of setting direction for designers, PMs and engineers who don't report to you.Exceptional communication of design rationale and technical tradeoffs to senior Product, Engineering and Business leaders.Public contributions to the design community: talks, writing or open-source design systems.