Director of Product Design in Edinburgh

About Skyscanner

Everyone loves travelling, but planning is not without its challenges. That's why we've spent 20 years building tools that turn travel-planning chaos into a breeze. Today, around 160 million travellers count on us every month to skip the whole “47 browser tabs open” phase and find flights, cars, and hotels quickly and easily. Joining Skyscanner means becoming part of a global brand that's striving to become the planet's go-to travel hack accessible for all.

About the role

This is a senior Product Design leadership role within our CX organisation. You'll own the product design direction for your area — shaping strategy, raising the quality bar, and developing the designers in your team. You'll be a key voice in the product triad — working closely with product and engineering counterparts to ensure design shapes decisions from the earliest stages, not just executes them. And you'll partner closely with other design leaders across CX, including Content and Research, to ensure your area's work fits coherently into the broader Skyscanner experience.

It's a role for someone who leads from the front: opinionated on craft, strong on coaching, and energised by the challenge of delivering great experiences at scale in a complex product environment.

What you'll be doing:

• Leading product design for your area: You'll set the design direction for your part of the product — defining what good looks like, holding the quality bar, and ensuring your team's work is consistently excellent and impactful.
• Operating with a company-wide lens: This role carries scope beyond a single product area. You'll bring a cross-vertical perspective to design decisions, contributing to how design quality and consistency scales across Skyscanner as a whole.
• Driving product strategy through design: You'll contribute to the product strategy for your area, helping shape what gets built and why — not just how it looks. You'll bring a user perspective to the earliest conversations and advocate for decisions that create real value for travellers.
• Developing your team: You'll lead, coach and develop a team of designers, building a culture of craft, curiosity and continuous improvement. You'll help people grow in their careers and do the best work of their lives.
• Collaborating across disciplines: You'll work closely with Product and Engineering leadership in your area, and build strong relationships across Product Design, Research and Content. You'll also partner with Brand Design to ensure your work is coherent with wider design standards and language.
• Influencing without authority: You'll represent design credibly at a senior level, aligning stakeholders around a shared direction and making the case for design investment when it matters.
• Measuring what matters: You'll define success through meaningful outcomes — customer insights, business metrics, and design quality signals — and use those to continuously improve how your team works and what it delivers.

About you:

• Experienced product design leader: You've built and led high-performing design teams within complex digital product environments, and you know how to get the best from designers at every level.
• Strong product instincts: You understand how great design creates business value, and you're equally comfortable in strategic conversations as you are reviewing interaction details with your team.
• Technically confident: You understand how design decisions translate to implementation — front-end technologies, component thinking, modern tooling — and that lets you partner effectively with engineering.
• AI-curious and forward-looking: You're interested in how AI is changing both the products we design and the way we design them, and you're building a point of view on both.
• Influential collaborator: You can navigate complex organisations, build trust with senior stakeholders, and communicate clearly across disciplines and seniority levels.
• People-first leader: You care about developing talent, creating inclusive environments, and helping teams do the best work of their careers.

What it's like here

We are the real deal— no corporate gloss, no empty promises. Just a team of genuinely curious, caring humans, building things that help travellers explore the world a little easier. Skyscanner is made up of brilliant humans from every corner of the world. We believe travel makes the world better — and that the same is true of our diverse teams. We're proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to building an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and products that are accessible to all.

Sound like your kind of adventure? Apply now and help us shape the future of travel. We're committed to ensuring our application and recruitment processes are inclusive and accessible to everyone. If you require any reasonable adjustments or accommodations for interviews, and/or wish to apply under the Disability Confident scheme, please let your recruiter know. If you’d like more information on any of our policies, such as hybrid working or Parental Leave policies, our recruitment team can provide more information on these.