Principal Design Manager

What You’ll Own

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of senior individual-contributor designers.
• Stay hands-on as a player-coach — personally owning and shipping design work on the highest-leverage or most ambiguous problems.
• Set design vision and craft direction for your area, ensuring quality and consistency across your team's work.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Marketing leaders to align design with business priorities.
• Own hiring and team composition for your area, adapting as the business and the team scale.
• Establish and evolve craft standards, critique practices, and design operating rhythms for the team.
• Represent design in cross-functional forums, translating design work into business impact.
• Balance individual craft contribution with management, modelling the standard you expect of the team.

Who We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of design experience, including experience managing and growing individual contributors (managing managers is a plus, not a requirement).
• A genuine player-coach — still hands-on and excellent at the craft, and energized by both doing the work and developing others.
• Proven track record of shipping high-quality design within a consumer product or creator / marketplace platform.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, coach, develop, and retain strong individual-contributor designers, especially at the senior level.
• Strong craft judgment and the ability to give — and model — high-leverage feedback.
• Experience partnering with Product, Engineering, and Marketing leaders.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into a clear design direction.
• Comfort balancing personal craft work with team leadership, and good judgment on when to do versus delegate.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• A growth mindset toward AI-accelerated design tools and how they change workflows.

Compensation

The base salary offered for this role is targeted at $250,000 - $290,000 for roles based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Final offers depend on multiple factors including location, experience, expertise, and role scope, and may vary from the range listed.

Linktree offers competitive compensation including equity, an annual wellbeing allowance, 100% coverage of monthly premiums for medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance for US-based employees, employer contribution towards retirement, generous time off, and an employee stock option program.