Design Leader, Software Design

We are looking for a Design Leader of Software Design to lead the end-to-end experience of Oura’s software products, with a primary focus on our member-facing mobile and web experiences. This role sits alongside our most senior individual contributors and is expected to operate in high ambiguity, set a clear design vision, and create enduring, company-level impact across multiple product areas.

You will build, lead, and mentor a multi-disciplinary design organization, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Data, and Brand to deliver coherent, insight-driven experiences across Oura’s ecosystem. You are accountable for raising the bar across four core dimensions: Operational Excellence (craft & execution), Impact (strategy & product value), Collaboration (communication & alignment), and Leadership (culture & people). This is a highly collaborative, hands-on leadership role based in Helsinki with a hybrid work model.

What you will do:

Lead and develop a high-performing design organization
You manage software design teams, overseeing multiple designers and design leads. You create the conditions for excellent work: clear expectations, strong feedback structures, and genuine investment in people’s growth. Your management style builds trust while holding a consistently high bar for design quality.

Mentor and develop designers
You invest in the people around you. You support designers at all levels through regular 1:1s, career conversations, and honest, actionable feedback. You help them see around corners, develop their craft, and grow their confidence,  not just their output.

Set a compelling, coherent design vision
You define what great looks like for Oura’s member-facing experiences across mobile and web  and you make that vision concrete and actionable for the team. You bring systems thinking to the full experience: flows, states, transitions, information hierarchy, microcopy, and the moments between interactions that make or break how a product feels.

Elevate craft through active participation
You are in the room for the work that matters. You lead critiques and working sessions that meaningfully improve what the team produces, not by overriding, but by modeling stronger thinking, asking sharper questions, and holding the quality line. Your presence raises the bar without taking over.

Define and steward the design system
You treat the design system as a lever for coherence and velocity,  not overhead. You work with design leads to evolve it as the product scales, ensuring it reflects Oura’s visual language and interaction standards across every surface.

Partner with product and engineering without ceding design authority
You build strong working relationships with product leadership and collaborate on roadmap priorities but you bring a distinct design perspective to those conversations. You know when to push back on pressures that would compromise the member experience, and you do it with clarity and respect.

Build and steward the team
You play an active role in recruiting, hiring, and onboarding designers. You help define what the team needs, and you bring the same rigor to hiring decisions that you bring to design decisions. Over time, you help shape the culture, norms, and practices that make the team exceptional.

Champion AI-enabled design workflows
You lead initiatives to incorporate AI tools, workflows, and new mental models that improve the speed, quality, and personalization of Oura’s experiences. You help designers see themselves as creative directors of AI-assisted output.

Requirements

We would love to have you on our team if you have: 

• Extensive experience (typically 10+ years) in software design, product design, or interaction design for digital products, including significant time in consumer or health tech environments.
• Proven leadership experience (3+ years) managing and growing UX teams in a product development organization, including setting clear expectations across different levels.
• A portfolio that demonstrates sustained ownership of complex, multi-surface experiences with clear evidence of your design thinking, not just team output. We want to understand your role in shaping outcomes, not just artifacts, especially in highly ambiguous or multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep fluency across interaction design, information architecture, visual hierarchy, motion, and systems thinking. You’ve shipped polished, coherent consumer software and you understand the difference between good and great at the detail level.
• Track record of improving experience quality in measurable ways through engagement signals, satisfaction scores, qualitative research findings, or reduced friction in core user flows.
• Demonstrated excellence in Operational Excellence (strong craft and execution on complex, multi-platform products) and Impact (connecting software design work to clear product outcomes).
• Strong evidence of Collaboration and Leadership: building effective cross-functional relationships, influencing senior stakeholders, and creating healthy, inclusive team cultures.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with experience presenting to senior leadership and facilitating complex design decisions.

We love

• Experience working on health, wellness, or other trust-sensitive products where emotional tone, clarity, and credibility must be carefully calibrated.
• A history of making the teams around you better through mentorship, cultural contribution, and sustained investment in design quality.
• Experience owning or co-owning a consumer design system and evolving it to serve a scaling product.
• Fluency with high-fidelity interaction prototyping not just static mocks, but communicating motion, feel, and micro-interactions at a fidelity that engineering can build from.
• Experience working with user researchers as partners: drawing on their insights to pressure-test and evolve design direction, without owning the research function yourself.
• Curiosity about AI tools and their effect on design practice with opinions about where human judgment is irreplaceable.
• Experience navigating the intersection of product design and brand, and knowing when and how to hold the line on quality.