Design Program Manager

About us
HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs the infrastructure to build, automate and scale. Today, HighLevel supports SMBs across 150+ countries, fueling community-driven growth rooted in real customer outcomes.To date, businesses operating on HighLevel have generated over $7 billion in ecosystem value, demonstrating the impact of shared infrastructure at scale. By centralizing conversations, automation and intelligence into one system, we help businesses move faster, reduce complexity and execute efficiently.Behind the platform, HighLevel powers more than 4 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily. With 250 terabytes of distributed data, 250+ microservices and over 1 million domain names supported, our architecture is built for performance, resilience and long-term scalability.

Our people

With over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries, HighLevel operates as a global, remote-first organization built for speed and ownership. We value initiative, clarity and execution, creating space for ambitious people to build systems that support millions of businesses worldwide. Here, innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated and people come first, no matter where they call home.

Our impact

Every month, HighLevel enables more than 1.5 billion messages, 200 million leads and 20 million conversations for the more than 1 million businesses we support. Behind those numbers are real people building independence, expanding opportunity and creating measurable impact. We’re proud to be a part of that.Learn more about us on our YouTube Channel or Blog Posts

About HighLevel
HighLevel is building the platform that helps agencies and small businesses grow: marketing, sales, messaging, automation, payments, reputation, and customer management in one product suite. The product is broad, fast-moving, and used by customers who depend on speed, reliability, and clear workflows every day.

The Product Design team is entering a new stage. We are just under 30 people today, spanning product design, research, design systems, and content strategy, with another 12-16 hires expected as the business scales. We have strong momentum and a company-wide bias toward velocity. Now we need a design operating model that can keep pace with that velocity while raising the bar for clarity, craft, coordination, and launch readiness.

We are hiring our first Design Program Manager to help build that model.

About The Role
As Design Program Manager, you will be the operating partner for Product Design. You will help the team mature an inconsistent and unruly design process into a clear, lightweight, repeatable system without slowing down the company's well-established ability to move quickly.

This is a foundational role embedded in the Product Design team. You will report into HighLevel's centralized program management office within the Office of the CTO, with a dotted-line partnership to the VP of Product Design. You will work closely with design leaders, product managers, engineering leaders, research, and data to improve how design work is planned, reviewed, staffed, communicated, and shipped. You will create the rituals and engagement models that help designers do better work, help cross-functional teams understand where design is headed, and help leaders see risks before they become fires.

This is not a heavyweight process role. The right person knows how to add just enough structure to improve quality and coordination while preserving urgency, ownership, and momentum.

What You'll Do

• Build and run Product Design's core operating cadence, including weekly status, critiques, design reviews, quarterly planning, and decision follow-through.

• Create lightweight systems that make priorities, milestones, dependencies, risks, and ownership clear across multiple product areas.

• Establish practical engagement models between Design and Product, Engineering, Research, and Data so teams know when and how to work together.

• Improve launch readiness by helping teams surface quality risks, clarify tradeoffs, and understand what is ready to ship.

• Partner with design systems leaders to strengthen craft rituals, shared standards, and adoption of reusable patterns across product teams.

• Give design leadership better visibility into capacity, resourcing pressure, delivery risks, and operational bottlenecks as the org grows.

• Reduce recurring fire drills and low-level project wrangling by turning ad hoc coordination into repeatable workflows.

• Partner with the centralized program management office and Product/Engineering operations while representing the needs of Product Design.

• Serve as the operational backbone of Research, owning consent management and incentive processing to enable researchers to run concurrent programs at scale.

• Help bridge multiple time zones (PST, EST and IST) and management levels to optimize for visibility of design team work

What Success Looks Like

In your first 90 days, you will have built trust with design leadership and key Product, Engineering, Research, and Data partners; mapped the biggest process breakdowns; and improved at least two core rituals such as weekly status, design reviews, critiques, or launch readiness.

Within six months, Product Design should have a clearer operating rhythm, fewer recurring fire drills, better cross-functional visibility, and more consistent expectations for how work moves from problem definition through design, review, build, and launch.

Within a year, the design org should be able to grow significantly without relying on heroic coordination from design leadership. Teams should move quickly, but with stronger shared standards, healthier decision-making, and fewer avoidable surprises.

You Might Be A Fit If You

• Have 7+ years of experience in design program management, design operations, product operations, technical program management, or a related role supporting product/design/engineering teams.

• Have worked in a high-growth product environment where priorities shift quickly and process needs to serve the work, not dominate it.

• Understand product design deeply enough to improve critiques, reviews, design quality rituals, and delivery workflows without needing to be the design decision-maker.

• Are excellent at turning ambiguity into operating clarity: agendas, decision logs, milestone plans, dependency maps, status systems, escalation paths, and practical rituals people actually use.

• Can build trust with designers while also being credible with product managers, engineers, researchers, and data partners.

• Know how to diagnose whether a problem is caused by unclear ownership, weak prioritization, poor communication, missing information, unrealistic timing, or an actual design gap.

• Communicate clearly and calmly, especially when teams are moving fast, tradeoffs are uncomfortable, or priorities are changing.

• Are comfortable working at multiple altitudes: helping shape an engagement model one hour and cleaning up a messy project tracker the next.

• Have strong judgment about when to add structure, when to simplify, and when to get out of the team's way.

Nice To Have

• Experience as the first design program manager or design operations hire in a scaling product organization.

• Experience supporting a design org of 25+ people across multiple product areas.

• Experience with design systems operations, product launch readiness, or cross-functional planning rituals.

• Familiarity with AI-enabled workflows for summarizing signals, maintaining operating systems, identifying risks, or making team communication more effective.

• Experience in B2B SaaS, platform products, multi-product suites, or products serving both SMB and partner/channel customers.

How We Work

HighLevel moves quickly. We value ownership, practical judgment, and people who can improve the system while staying close to the work. This role is for someone who can make a fast-moving design org more mature without making it slower, more bureaucratic, or less ambitious.

You will report into HighLevel's centralized program management office within the Office of the CTO, with a dotted-line relationship to the VP of Product Design and day-to-day embedded partnership with the Product Design team. You will work closely with leaders across Product, Engineering, Research, and Data.

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The salary range for this position is $125000 - $159000 annually.