Associate Director, Design

Company description

Digitas is the Networked Experience Agency, built on the vision that we create magnetic experiences that earn the right for brands to exist in human networks. Today, and tomorrow. We deliver Networked Experiences by leveraging comprehensive data, technology, creative, media and strategy capabilities. Digitas delivers ambitious outcomes via unique solutions that include Creative Experiences, Integrated Media, Addressable Relationships, Social Marketing and Total Commerce.

Celebrated by AdAge as Data and Insights Agency of the Year, U.S Campaign’s Brand Experience Agency of the Year, Media Network of the Year and celebrated by Forrester and Gartner, Digitas serves the world’s leading brands through a global network comprised of more than 5,500 employees across over 65 offices in 43 countries.

The Digitas culture is made up of fearless, inventive and generous Unicorns of all kinds.

This role is focused on building and scaling a cohesive design system for our own suite of AI-powered solutions, primarily used across internal tools and platforms. This role defines the core patterns, components, and interaction models that ensure these tools are consistent, usable, accessible, and trustworthy at scale.

The work centers on platform and systems design; creating shared foundations so AI features behave in predictable, understandable ways across internal workflows. Rather than designing one-off experiences, this role focuses on building durable systems that support ongoing evolution.

While the primary focus of this role is internal, there will be select opportunities to contribute to client-facing work and to support occasional new business efforts.

This role shapes how our AI tools are designed, built, and scaled over time.

• Build and evolve the AI design system
  • Define system-level patterns for AI interactions, states, and behaviors
  • Create reusable components and standards that support multiple tools and audiences
  • Ensure consistency across internal and client-facing AI products
  • Establish governance for how AI capabilities are designed, extended, and maintained
• Design platform-level AI experiences
  • Design shared interaction models for generative, assistive, and automated capabilities
  • Ensure AI features integrate cleanly into existing workflows and tools
  • Design human-in-the-loop patterns as system defaults, not exceptions
  • Account for scale, permissions, and role-based usage
• Embed ethics, trust, and accessibility into the system
  • Bake ethical safeguards, transparency, and explainability into system patterns
  • Design guardrails that reduce bias, misuse, and over-automation across tools
  • Ensure accessibility standards are built into components, flows, and defaults
  • Reduce cognitive load and improve comprehension across AI-enabled experiences
• Partner across teams to drive adoption
  • Work closely with product and dev
  • Align system decisions with technical constraints and business goals
  • Communicate system intent and usage clearly to internal teams and clients
  • Champion system consistency over one-off solutions

Systems and product design experience

• 6-8+ years as an experience designer (hybrid UX/UI) with product experience and with ownership of platforms or design systems
• Experience designing complex, multi-surface, or enterprise products
• Proven ability to create systems that scale across teams and use cases

AI and platform fluency

• Experience designing AI-powered tools or capabilities
• Comfort treating AI as an extensible system capability, not a feature
• Strong understanding of human-in-the-loop and probabilistic behaviors

Ethics and accessibility as fundamentals

• Practical experience embedding ethical considerations into product design
• Working knowledge of accessibility standards and inclusive design
• Ability to translate ethics and accessibility into reusable system patterns

Judgment and collaboration

• Strong product judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Clear communicator who can influence cross-functional partners
• Comfortable balancing long-term system health with near-term delivery

Our Publicis Groupe motto “Viva LaDifférence” means we’re better together, and we believe…