Design Manager

About Samsung Food

At Samsung Food (you might know us as Whisk), we are pioneering the future of everyday care and health — helping individuals and families around the world live better through connected, proactive, and personalized experiences. Our mission is to connect food, health, and home across the Samsung ecosystem, turning data from your devices into personalized guidance that supports you and your loved ones.

We work at the intersection of AI, nutrition, behavior change, and digital health. The Samsung Food app was included in Google Play’s Best of 2020 Everyday Essentials list, has been regularly featured on the Apple App Store, and was nominated for a 2021 Webby Award. We’ve also launched Vision AI, which recognises food and meals using our global Food Genome, and developed deep integrations with Samsung Health and SmartThings.

We are a remote-first team of more than 100 people in over 30 countries, united by our commitment to innovation and impact. As part of Samsung Electronics, we combine the agility of a startup with the scale of the world’s largest consumer electronics company. Join us and help build technology that improves daily life for tens of millions of people across phones, wearables, TVs, and kitchen appliances in the years to come.

Learn more about how we’ve shaped a high-performing global team over the past 14 years.

About the Role
As a Design Manager at Whisk, you will drive a team of Product Designers responsible for delivering high-quality experiences across food, nutrition, health, and connected home surfaces. Your core mandate is to ensure design is predictable, disciplined, and tightly integrated into our product development lifecycle.

As a Design Manager at Whisk, your job is to support a high-performance team delivering high-quality design work to strict deadlines driven by global marketing rollouts at the scale of Samsung. We need a leader who is obsessed with execution, someone who can take complex product requirements and turn them into a disciplined, predictable delivery stream.

You’ll drive planning, structure, and quality across the design delivery process, guide designers in elevating their craft within delivery constraints, and ensure our work meets Samsung’s global requirements — from accessibility standards to lock processes and system alignment. 

You will be the primary owner of design delivery once concepts move into execution, with a clear mandate to drive convergence, lock decisions, and ensure on-time, production-ready outcomes.

You’ll act as a multiplier for the team, improving how we work, how we collaborate, and how effectively design contributes to shipping meaningful, polished user experiences. 

This is a role for a people-first leader who brings clarity, structure, and rigor, and who knows how to scale design in a fast-moving, distributed product organization.

In this role, you will:

• Own the end-to-end design delivery operating model for the Product / Delivery track, ensuring work is scoped clearly, resourced effectively, and executed predictably. You’ll establish practical standards for how design estimates, prioritizes, and aligns with product roadmaps, and you’ll actively manage design capacity and tradeoffs across initiatives to protect delivery timelines and team focus.
• Help cultivate a strong culture of design craft, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Run core design rituals — critiques, design reviews, lock decisions, handoff checkpoints, and retrospectives. You will set the bar for quality and create structure that helps designers work with confidence and clarity. You’ll own the definition of done to help teams commit to final, build-ready designs on schedule.
• Integrate design into our strategic delivery lifecycle process by partnering with Product, Engineering, and the Head of Strategic Delivery. You will navigate pressured timelines, proactively identifying risks to delivery schedules and make the calls on scope or trade-offs to unblock teams and ensure smooth, on-time delivery from concept to production. 
• Ensure all design outputs meet global requirements including accessibility, analytics, localization readiness, and documentation standards that you develop and manage.
• Lead multiple interconnected design systems, guiding their evolution, governance, and cross-surface utilization. You’ll ensure consistent patterns and UI decisions across mobile, wearable, and emerging surfaces, aligned with Samsung One UI, and that teams are using them consistently during delivery.
• Improve and scale design processes, identifying bottlenecks, optimizing workflows, and introducing structured practices that raise velocity, clarity, and quality across the team, ensuring these practices are part of how the team works day to day.
• Foster strong cross-functional alignment, helping teams understand design decisions, tradeoffs, and rationale. You’ll create communication clarity and effective collaboration across time zones and disciplines.

What we’re looking for:

• Proven experience leading product designers with a track record of developing talent, coaching through ambiguity, and setting clear expectations.
• Demonstrated ability to make clear decisions and tradeoffs under delivery pressure, and to be accountable for outcomes.
• Deep understanding of the end-to-end design delivery process, including planning, estimation, reviews, handoff, and QA.
• Experience operationalizing design in a cross-functional environment, ideally within a global or multi-surface product ecosystem.
• Strong grasp of design systems, UI frameworks, and platform standards — with the ability to evaluate patterns, enforce consistency, and guide system evolution.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to simplify complexity and build trust across Product, Engineering, and leadership.
• Comfort with distributed teams, working across time zones (U.S. ↔ Korea) and collaborating asynchronously.
• Strong product design judgment, with the ability to evaluate design work at all fidelity levels and make and defend quality decisions in the context of delivery constraints. 
• Strong operational mindset, with experience implementing processes that scale and keep teams aligned.
• Bonus: Experience in food, health, wellness, or behavior-led product domains; experience at a global tech or hardware company with a software services layer.

Requirements

• Degree or equivalent experience in Product Design, HCI, UX, or related field.
• 8+ years of experience in Product Design, with meaningful experience managing designers or owning design delivery in complex, cross-functional environments. 
• Proficiency in Figma and modern design tools.
• Examples of leadership impact (portfolio, case studies, process artifacts).
• Strong English communication skills.
• Ability to work flexibly across time zones.