Associate Director - AI Innovation Lab, Human-centered Design

Location: Liverpool Office Hub (GBLIVROY)

Company

hirify.global runs and reimagines mission-critical technology systems for leading businesses, using AI-powered insight to support smarter decisions and faster innovation.

What you will do

• Own end-to-end customer innovation engagements, including challenge framing, success measures, immersion, co-design workshops, prototype builds, and post-Lab follow-through.
• Act as a strategic customer contact and trusted advisor, guiding CIOs, CTOs, COOs, and senior leadership through ambiguity, co-design, and strategic decisions.
• Translate enterprise priorities, user needs, and operational realities into value hypotheses and actionable design challenges.
• Define human-AI system interactions, including handoffs, exceptions, control, and accountability between people and agents.
• Direct multidisciplinary teams through focused prototype builds using realistic scenarios and synthetic personas, and define the evidence required for validation.
• Convert validated findings into executive recommendations, reusable methods, prompts, agent states, policies, reference builds, and next steps; build practice capability and coach multidisciplinary talent.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Design, HCI, Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Architecture, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in design, innovation, or consulting, including 3+ years leading multidisciplinary teams and owning executive customer relationships.
• Proven portfolio of end-to-end innovation engagements covering challenge framing, prototyping, testing, and business outcomes.
• Executive presence and facilitation skills, with experience guiding C-suite stakeholders through complex co-design and decisions.
• Strong business acumen and human-centered design leadership across research, framing, validation, and live implementation.
• Practical AI opportunity fluency and sufficient understanding of generative and agentic systems to direct credible prototypes.
• Ability to align designers, researchers, engineers, and commercial teams around unified goals.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree or MBA in Design, HCI, Innovation, Business, or a related field.
• Experience in a design consultancy, innovation lab, product studio, or creative agency.
• Cross-industry exposure, including Financial Services, Retail, or Healthcare, across global markets.
• Hands-on familiarity with digital, spatial, or physical prototyping, Figma, Miro, and enterprise AI governance.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time role in a flexible, supportive, hybrid-friendly culture.
• Focus on inclusion, belonging, empathy, customer success, and shared success.
• Well-being programs supporting financial, mental, physical, and social health.
• Professional certifications, coaching, personalized development goals, continuous feedback, and learning opportunities with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
• Opportunities to progress horizontally into other technical or non-technical areas or vertically into senior leadership and specialized domain roles.