Associate Director, Experience Design

Company Description

 

Digitas is the connected marketing agency, a full-service agency with modern creative & media, data, and technology services all under one roof. We are connected in the way we think and the way we work. At the heart of our company are great people that we call Unicorns. Our Unicorns are fearless, innovative, generous and love to solve complex problems for clients in unique ways.

 

Our AI team is the manifestation of these values and sits at the intersection of product design and digital transformation, allowing us to build platforms and tools that make real internal and client impact.

Job Description

This role is focused on shaping, building, and scaling two very unique products, both leveraging emerging principles of AI Design and AI-ready design systems.

 

In this role you'll define the core patterns, components, and interactions that ensure these tools are consistent, usable, accessible, and trustworthy at scale. Rather than designing one-off experiences, this role focuses on building durable systems that support ongoing evolution for our internal teams, and also for brands. This is an exciting and unique role that allows designers to span two different teams, to guide systems thinking, mentor other AI-forward designers, and further build out our AI Design capabilities.  

Responsibilities

Building and evolving two AI design systems:

• Define system-level patterns for AI interactions, states, and behaviors
• Create reusable components and standards that support multiple tools and audiences
• Ensure consistency across internal and client-facing AI products
• Establish governance for how AI capabilities are designed, extended, and maintained

Designing platform-level AI experiences

• Design shared interaction models for generative, assistive, and automated capabilities
• Ensure AI features integrate cleanly into existing workflows and tools
• Design human-in-the-loop patterns as system defaults, not exceptions
• Account for scale, permissions, and role-based usage

 Embedding ethics, trust, and accessibility into the system

• Bake ethical safeguards, transparency, and explainability into system patterns
• Design guardrails that reduce bias, misuse, and over-automation across tools
• Ensure accessibility standards are built into components, flows, and defaults
• Reduce cognitive load and improve comprehension across AI-enabled experiences

Partnering across teams to drive adoption

• Work closely other disciplines, from product, content strategy, front and back-end dev, as well as AM and PM
• Align design decisions with technical constraints and business goals
• Communicate system intent and usage clearly to internal teams and clients
• Champion system consistency over one-off solutions 

Qualifications

Systems and product design experience

• 7 to 9 years as an experience designer (hybrid UX/UI) with product experience and ownership of platforms or design systems
• Experience designing complex systems or enterprise products
• Proven ability to create systems that scale across teams and use cases

AI and platform fluency

• Experience designing AI-powered tools or capabilities
• Comfort treating AI as an extensible system capability, not just a feature
• Strong understanding of human-centered AI principles

Ethics and accessibility

• Practical experience embedding ethical considerations into product design
• Working knowledge of accessibility standards and inclusive design
• Ability to translate ethics and accessibility into reusable system patterns

Judgment and collaboration

• Strong product judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Clear communicator who can influence cross-functional partners
• Comfortable balancing long-term system health with near-term delivery

Additional Information

This role is based in the New York office. Our Publicis Groupe motto “Viva La Différence” means we’re better together, and we believe that our differences make us stronger. It means we honor and celebrate all identities, across all facets of intersectionality, and it underpins all that we do as an organization. We are focused on fostering belonging and creating equitable & inclusive experiences for all talent.  Publicis Groupe provides robust and inclusive benefit programs and policies to support the evolving and diverse needs of our talent and enable every person to grow and thrive.  Our benefits package includes medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401K,  as well as parental and family care leave, family forming assistance, tuition reimbursement, and flexible time off. If you require accommodation or assistance with the application or onboarding process specifically, please contact [email protected]. Compensation Range: $106,780.00 - $170,937.00 annually. This is the pay range the Company believes it will pay for this position at the time of this posting. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time. Temporary roles may be eligible to participate in our freelancer/temporary employee medical plan through a third-party benefits administration system once certain criteria have been met. Temporary roles may also qualify for participation in our 401(k) plan after eligibility criteria have been met. For regular roles, the Company will offer medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401k, and paid time off. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.