Senior Director of User Experience Design, Equinix
$223-335k
Canada - Toronto Office TRO : 202,000 - 302,000 CAD / Annual. Plus bonus
Digital infrastructure company
Be an early applicant
Digital infrastructure company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$223-335k
Canada - Toronto Office TRO : 202,000 - 302,000 CAD / Annual. Plus bonus
1001+ employees
Company mission
To provide finance, manufacturing, transport, government, and healthcare organizations a cloud-first world.
Role
Who you are
- 12+ years of experience in UX/product design with at least 5 years leading design organizations at scale
- Proven track record of developing and executing design strategies that deliver measurable business impact
- Experience partnering with C-suite and senior executives to drive alignment on experience vision and investments
- Demonstrated ability to champion user needs while balancing business constraints and technical feasibility
- Strong experience in B2B SaaS, infrastructure, or colocation/data center industries
- Experience with both customer-facing and internal/employee experience design
- Familiarity with accessibility standards and inclusive design practices
- Understanding of design operations and how to scale design practice efficiently
- Deep expertise across the full spectrum of UX disciplines: research, service design, interaction design, information architecture, and design systems
- Portfolio demonstrating work that spans digital products and physical experiences
- Strong point of view on design quality with the ability to elevate craft across an organization
- Experience establishing and scaling design systems that teams genuinely adopt
- Exceptional ability to influence without authority and build coalitions across Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Operations
- Track record of chartering and funding successful cross-organizational design initiatives
- Experience collaborating with technology leaders to influence architecture decisions for better user outcomes
- Skilled at translating between design language and business/technical language
- Strong background in both generative and evaluative user research methodologies
- Experience using research to de-risk major product investments and inform strategic decisions
- Ability to synthesize insights from multiple sources (qualitative, quantitative, market) into clear recommendations
- Comfort with ambiguity and creating structure where none exists
- Proven ability to attract, develop, and retain exceptional design talent
- Experience building career frameworks and progression paths that support growth and retention
- Track record of developing leaders, not just individual contributors
- Commitment to fostering inclusive, collaborative team culture
- This isn't a role where design is an afterthought—it's a strategic imperative. We're looking for someone who can see around corners, champion the user perspective at the highest levels, and build an organization that makes great design inevitable
What the job involves
- We're seeking a visionary user experience design leader to define and elevate the experience across our entire ecosystem. from digital products to physical spaces, customer touchpoints and employee workflows
- As Senior Director and Head of UX Design, you'll set the strategic direction for how people interact with our organization, translating business objectives into coherent, measurable, and delightful experiences
- His is a high-impact leadership role where you'll partner with executives across Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Operations and People to ensure design isn't just integrated into our development process—it drives it
- As Head of UX Design, you'll champion the user's perspective at the highest levels, derisk major investments through strategic research, and build the design organization that will scale with our ambitions
- Develop and execute a comprehensive UX strategy that aligns customer, partner, and employee experiences with business objectives
- Establish a clear, inspiring vision for experience design across all products and services—digital and physical
- Define the principles that guide design decisions throughout the organization, ensuring consistency and alignment with measurable business outcomes
- Codify critical user journeys at the executive level, making them actionable, measurable, and accountable
- Serve as a strategic partner to senior business leaders (S/VPs in Product, CRO, Operations) to align on desired user experiences and business outcomes
- Champion and fund cross-functional design initiatives that span multiple teams, enabling more intuitive and scalable products
- Partner deeply with Product and Engineering to integrate UX into all development processes from inception through launch
- Collaborate with Marketing to ensure brand consistency across every digital and physical touchpoint
- Work with Operations to optimize field service experiences and physical space design, including facility wayfinding
- Influence technology architecture decisions to ensure both scalability and exceptional usability
- Create and govern design systems that ensure consistency across our entire experience ecosystem
- Oversee the development of cohesive patterns, shared language, and consistent nomenclature that teams actually adopt
- Drive adoption of design systems and content standards—making them the path of least resistance, not optional
- Establish and enforce accessibility standards that meet or exceed WCAG guidelines
- Oversee experience architecture and information architecture to ensure logical navigation and efficient user flows
- Ensure design work solves the right problems by embedding validation with real users throughout the process
- Build research practice that combines generative discovery (identifying unmet needs in the colocation market) with evaluative testing
- Translate research insights into actionable design opportunities and compelling business recommendations
- Establish feedback loops that continuously inform design decisions with both qualitative and quantitative data
- De-risk major product investments through strategic research, journey audits, and rigorous hypothesis testing
- Recruit, mentor, and scale a high-performing UX team including researchers, designers, and design technologists
- Create clear career ladders and growth paths for UX Research, Service Design, and Design Operations roles
- Foster a culture of craft, collaboration, and continuous learning that attracts and retains top talent
- Develop your team's strategic thinking and business acumen so they can be effective partners across the organization
- You'll have the rare opportunity to shape experience design for a global organization at the heart of the AI super-cycle at a critical inflection point
- Your work will directly influence how thousands of customers, partners, and employees interact with our organization every day
- You'll build the design practice from a position of strength, with executive support to make bold bets and the autonomy to define what great looks like
Our take
Equinix is a veteran player in the digital infrastructure market, connecting industry-leading organizations in finance, manufacturing, retail, transportation, government, healthcare, and education.
The company provides a range of services within the categories of digital, support, data center, and interconnection, with capabilities including, for example, simplifying hybrid cloud deployments or securing on-site deployments. It has an extensive range of partners, granting its clients access to a vast range of industry-leading technologies atop its own offerings.
With a wide global presence, Equinix has secured a path to continued success by its ability to keep abreast of developments in the space. The company is comfortably positioned to remain a robust and leading player across multiple growth avenues and can be expected to make more smart developments and partnerships in the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Redwood Shores, Redwood City, CA
Leadership
Adaire Fox-Martin
(CEO & President)Prior to becoming CEO of Equinix in 2024, Adaire spent nearly 3 years at Google in various roles, including Head of Google Ireland and President of Google Cloud Go to Market. She also spent nearly 14 years at SAP and over 18 years at Oracle Corporation.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 58 more jobs at Equinix