Senior Design Manager

The Opportunity

AfterShip is a post-purchase experience SaaS platform for ecommerce brands. It brings shipping & labels, order tracking, AI predictive delivery, and returns management into one system—giving merchants a single place to manage and automate everything that happens after checkout, reduce support inquiries, and improve the customer experience.

We are entering a transformative chapter. AI is rewriting what post-purchase can be—moving our platform from reactive transactional updates to predictive, intelligent experiences. As our Senior Design Manager, you will lead our design pod, owning the core post-purchase product suite as well as our foundational Design System.

Above all else, we are looking for an exceptional product design practitioner. You will set the bar for UX craft, product judgment, and design systems while managing our largest team, bridging North American product strategy with China-based execution.

What you’ll do

1. Drive Exceptional UX Design Craft & Product Vision (Core Focus)

• Uncompromising Bar for Craft: Set and elevate the design standard across our foundational vertical product lines—Tracking, Returns, and Shipping. You know what world-class B2B SaaS looks and feels like and can get into the details of complex user workflows.
• Western Market & Product Taste: Apply a deep, nuanced understanding of North American product design standards, consumer expectations, and modern UX patterns to guide the product suite.
• Design System Stewardship: Oversee the evolution of our design system. Ensure it serves as both a high-caliber UI component library and a shared platform architecture that enforces UX consistency across all products.
• AI-Forward Craft: Drive an "AI-forward" approach within product design—both in how we leverage AI tools to accelerate design operations and prototyping, and how we design intelligent, predictive UX patterns into our products.

2. Strategic Communication & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Bilingual Strategic Translation: Serve as the functional communication bridge between our North American design leadership and your team in China. Translate high-level business goals set in English into clear, actionable design direction in Mandarin—and advocate for your team's on-the-ground needs back to North American leadership.
• Cross-Pod & Project Alignment: Collaborate closely with peer Pod Leads (Omnichannel, Platform, AI, Growth), PMs, and Engineering leads to ensure your team's vertical depth seamlessly integrates into a cohesive, single-platform experience across AfterShip.

3. People-First Management & Coaching

• Talent Development: Directly manage, mentor, and build career pathways for a growing team of product designers (including those dedicated to design systems) in China.
• Empathetic Leadership: Provide clear direction, constructive design feedback, and daily support in native Mandarin to team members of varying English proficiencies, fostering a high-trust, low-ego environment across distributed or local setups.

What’s we’re looking for

1. Mastery of Product Design & UX (Primary Criterion):

• 6+ years in Product Design with an exceptional portfolio showing deep systems thinking, complex B2B SaaS/e-commerce workflows, and polished visual/interaction design execution.
• Proven experience scaling design systems and maintaining design quality across large, interconnected product architectures.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI-assisted design tools and a forward-thinking approach to designing AI-driven product features.

2. Communication & Collaboration:

• Professional English Communication: Strong enough verbal and written English to present design rationale in English-speaking leadership meetings, collaborate directly with the Head of Design, and digest strategic documentation.
• Strong diplomatic skills to align product managers, engineers, and peer design leads across project teams and locations.

3. People Leadership: 2+ years of formal people management experience leading design pods in a tech or SaaS environment, with a track record of coaching designers to elevate their craft.

4. Preferred Background

• Experience in post-purchase e-commerce, logistics, supply chain tech, or high-volume merchant platforms.
• Prior experience operating within US–Asia cross-border team dynamics or distributed management setups across China.

Who you are

• A High-Bar Craft Champion: You live and breathe product design. You have strong taste, sharp product intuition, and can immediately spot where a user flow breaks down.
• A Strategic Bridge: You articulate design rationale effortlessly—driving alignment across cross-functional partners (Product, Engineering, Design) and project teams alike, while seamlessly connecting strategic direction between North America and our China design team.
• A People-First Manager: You take genuine joy in growing designer talent, unblocking team members in their native language, and building a high-trust, low-ego pod culture.