[Hiring] Strategic Design Leader @EPAM Systems

Role Description

We're looking for a Strategic Design Leader who thrives at the crossroads of business strategy, customer experience, research, innovation, AI-driven delivery, and digital transformation. This position takes ambiguous business problems and converts them into clearly defined opportunities, aligned decision-making, and executive-ready deliverables. This isn't a standard UX, Product Design, or people-management role. It's a hands-on leadership position suited for someone who can shape business pursuits, navigate complex client work, craft persuasive stories, set direction for prototypes, and bring together multidisciplinary teams spanning multiple accounts.

Responsibilities

• Guide discovery and problem framing throughout complex transformation, modernization, and innovation projects, structuring ambiguous challenges.
• Bring together customer needs, business goals, operational boundaries, and technology viability into a single strategic outlook.
• Shift uncertainty into organized hypotheses, decisions, plans, and measurable outcomes that propel work forward.
• Lead dialogue with senior-level stakeholders and work through differing opinions to achieve consensus.
• Craft experience visions, design principles, customer journeys, service ecosystems, and future-state concepts that shape transformation initiatives.
• Recognize friction, opportunity zones, and intervention points across various channels, roles, and operational frameworks.
• Turn strategic vision into actionable experience structures, roadmaps, and prototype direction documents.
• Verify that recommendations hold up commercially and can realistically be delivered, not just sound good in theory.
• Collaborate with account and delivery leadership to develop strategic opportunities and client propositions.
• Create proposal content, methodologies, workstreams, staffing structures, estimates, and governance models to support pursuits.
• Build unique perspectives, demos, and prototype stories that support confident client decision-making.
• Take an active role in pitches, workshops, executive discussions, and subsequent follow-up conversations.
• Combine user research, market insights, competitive data, stakeholder feedback, and operational details into unified understanding.
• Separate solid evidence from guesswork and identify key gaps that demand attention.
• Transform evidence into implications, recommendations, and decision-ready stories instead of basic reporting.
• Develop strategic presentations, perspectives, one-pagers, proposals, workshop content, transformation stories, and frameworks for decisions.
• Arrange intricate information so it's understandable, credible, and ready for executive action.
• Keep information hierarchy, visual storytelling, and editorial quality consistently high across all materials.
• Leverage tools like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Figma AI, Miro AI, and research agents to speed up research, synthesis, content creation, and prototype work.
• Develop repeatable, AI-supported workflows while maintaining strong judgment, verification processes, and quality checks.
• Guide teams toward using AI as a productivity booster without losing strategic depth or settling for generic results.
• Give hands-on strategic direction to researchers, service designers, UX and product designers, content strategists, and solution teams.
• Convert executive vision into clear briefs, structured workflows, and quality standards that steer team output.
• Lead successfully through influence, including scenarios where formal reporting authority doesn't exist.

Qualifications

• Over a decade of experience across experience strategy, service design, innovation, consulting, product strategy, or digital transformation.
• Clear track record owning complicated client engagements from the earliest framing stages through recommendations and concept definition.
• Hands-on background working directly with senior client stakeholders and account leadership to drive results.
• A compelling portfolio featuring executive narratives, strategic deliverables, and transformation-focused work.
• Highly developed facilitation skill, fostering productive alignment among stakeholders with conflicting perspectives.
• Strong ability to synthesize, taking complex and varied information and turning it into clear, actionable insight.
• Exceptional written communication skill, capable of crafting polished materials suited for executive audiences.
• Strong presentation ability, able to communicate sophisticated strategic ideas clearly and confidently.
• Proven capacity to handle multiple high-priority workstreams concurrently without losing narrative consistency or output quality.
• Professional fluency in English and Spanish, strongly preferred given this role's LATAM-focused scope.

Nice to have

• Holding a relevant Product Management certification would be seen as a beneficial addition to your profile.