Design Program Manager

Nothing’s Software Design team defines how our products feel: the OS, native Apps, AI features, and the connective tissue across our devices. Your job is to ensure this team can do its best work and that the rest of the company is in lockstep with it.

As Design Program Manager, you sit inside the Software Design team and act as its operational backbone and primary liaison to Software Engineering, Industrial Design, Product, Brand & Marketing, and regional teams. You own the flow: timelines, documentation, decision-making, and communication. You protect the quality of the work by protecting the clarity around it.

This is not admin. This is a role for someone who is structured, detail-oriented, design-literate, technically conversant, and able to bring order to fast-paced, ambiguous, multi-team environments without stifling creativity.

What you’ll do

You will:

• Own and run the end-to-end project rhythm for Software Design across OS, native apps, audio, watch, and AI experiences. From brief to launch.
• Translate the team’s roadmap into clear plans, milestones, and dependencies that engineering, industrial design, and marketing can execute against.
• Ensure every key initiative has crisp artifacts: briefs, timelines, specs, design decisions, RFCs, release notes. Keep them up to date, accessible, and enforced.
• Drive alignment: run check-ins, rituals, and reviews that keep the right people in the room, surface decisions early, and remove ambiguity.
• Track risks across functions (scope, tech feasibility, design debt, timelines, market moments) and proactively drive mitigation with owners.
• Act as a clear, calm point-of-contact for stakeholders globally. Consolidating input, filtering noise, and ensuring Software Design’s intent is accurately represented.
• Uphold quality: ensure that what ships reflects the agreed-upon design vision. Know when to escalate if timelines threaten the experience.
• Continuously refine how we work: improve processes, tools, and communication flows without adding bureaucracy.

What we’re looking for

You are:

• Experienced: typically 5+ years in program management across software, product design, or consumer tech. You’ve shipped complex, multi-team work.
• Technically fluent: you understand modern product development (Android/OS, apps, services, APIs, design systems, AI-powered features) well enough to challenge assumptions and map dependencies.
• Design-literate: you care about craft and interaction quality. You can understand and defend a design rationale, not just a date.
• Operationally sharp: you build realistic plans, hold people accountable, and keep multiple tracks moving without dropping details.
• An exceptional communicator: concise writing, strong documentation habits, and the ability to translate between design, engineering, marketing, and leadership.
• Comfortable with ambiguity: you can create clarity from incomplete information, make trade-offs explicit, and keep momentum.
• High ownership, low ego: you do what’s needed. Facilitation, follow-ups, decks, and docs to make the team excellent.
• Experience in a design-led or hardware+software company, ideally in consumer electronics or mobile.