Design Manager, Experiential

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, and grow a team of brand and experiential designers—setting clear expectations, fostering a culture of craft, and creating an environment where designers do their best work
• Own the creative direction for Stripe's experiential design output: event design systems, digital and environmental graphics, keynote design concepting, and brand activations
• Partner with the Experiential Creative Director and Brand Studio leadership to define the strategic creative vision for how Stripe shows up in the world
• Champion creative quality—establish and maintain a high bar across all deliverables, from concept through execution
• Build and evolve Stripe's experiential design system: scalable standards, templates, and creative frameworks that work globally across teams and events
• Oversee relationships with external agencies, contractors, production studios, and vendor partners—aligning on creative direction and ensuring quality delivery
• Collaborate cross-functionally with corporate events and product marketing, product design, brand design, and executive communications teams
• Recruit, hire, and onboard design talent to build out the team as the function grows
• Develop direct reports through regular 1:1s, structured feedback, career development conversations, and thoughtful performance calibration
• Represent the Experiential design function in leadership forums and cross-functional planning processes

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant design experience, including 3+ years managing and growing a team of designers
• Proven track record of creative direction for high-profile brand design and experiences, and events at a global scale
• Strong people leadership skills—you have developed design talent, navigated performance challenges, and built healthy, high-output teams
• Deep understanding of experiential design: environmental graphics, stage and scenic design, digital/physical brand integration, wayfinding, and event identity systems
• Ability to design and art direct across a wide range of surface areas (digital, physical, motion, communication) and tooling (Figma, Keynote, Adobe Creative Cloud, and AI tools)
• Strong executive presence—you can present and defend creative decisions to senior leaders with confidence and clarity
• Ability to simultaneously manage creative quality and team health—you know when to coach, when to redirect, and when to roll up your sleeves
• Systems-thinking approach with a track record of building scalable creative frameworks and extending shared patterns across a global brand
• Experience managing agency relationships and large-scale external production partners
• Strong track record of influencing without authority across marketing, product, and executive stakeholders
• Ability to balance creative ambition and operational rigor, consistently shipping world-class work on deadline and on budget
• Persuasive and humble, with a drive to seek feedback, and model the creative and collaborative behaviors that make great teams
• Excellent communication and presentation skills—equally comfortable writing a creative brief and presenting work to a range of stakeholders
• Highly detail-oriented, with a drive for perfection in every experience you ship
• Passionate about Stripe's mission, dedicated to a user-first mindset, and grounded in data and business context