Senior Design Manager

Join Grindr, the leading social networking app for the LGBTQ+ community. As a Senior Design Manager, you will lead and develop a team of product designers, own the design quality and strategic direction for your product area, and partner with product and engineering leadership to shape roadmap decisions. You will also build structures, rituals, and standards to make the design team more consistent, efficient, and impactful over time. This is an opportunity to build a lasting design culture and operating model that enhances the team's skills and sharpens product decisions.

• Lead and develop a team of product designers, setting a high craft bar and creating conditions for designers to do their best work.
• Own the design quality and strategic direction for your product area, making strong creative calls and credibly pushing back when necessary.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to shape roadmap decisions, helping to set direction rather than just reviewing designs.
• 7+ years of product design experience, including at least 3 years managing and developing designers in a professional setting
• Strong design craft - a portfolio or body of work that demonstrates you have not drifted away from the work and can evaluate quality with credibility and specificity
• Track record of developing designers - not just managing workloads, but actively coaching individuals, delivering hard feedback, and helping people grow into larger scopes
• Experience hiring designers and maintaining a high talent bar through a recruiting process - not just backfilling seats but building a team deliberately
• Experience working in both large, structured design organizations and smaller, resource-constrained environments - with the ability to bring the best of both to a lean team
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a cross-functional partner at the leadership level - influencing product direction, navigating competing priorities, and building trust with PM and engineering peers
• Are AI-native or rapidly becoming so - you actively use AI tools in your workflow and are always looking for new ways to leverage them
• Have seen how design operates at scale and know which parts of that are worth importing - and which parts slow things down in a leaner environment
• Stay close to the craft even as your scope grows - you can give specific, credible feedback on a design decision without needing to redo it yourself
• Build trust quickly with engineers and PMs - not by accommodating every request, but by showing up with clear reasoning, strong opinions, and genuine curiosity about their constraints