Summary

The tools people use to protect their organizations deserve to be as thoughtfully designed as they are powerfully built. As VP of UX at Netskope, you will own the design experience across our entire security platform — setting the vision, shaping the org, and ensuring that every interaction reflects genuine care for the people who depend on our products every day. Reporting to the Chief Product Officer, you will lead a distributed team of designers, researchers, and UX managers, translate design quality into business outcomes, and partner closely with Product, Engineering, and our Content team to raise the bar across the board. You will also lead the charge on embedding research and AI into how the team works — not as add-ons, but as core to how great design gets made.

Job Responsibilities

Leadership & Team

• Lead a distributed UX team across the US and Taiwan — designers, researchers, and UX managers — staying grounded and connected across time zones, present and invested in each person's growth
• Build and sustain a culture of openness, curiosity, and high craft — where sharing unfinished work is the norm, feedback sharpens rather than diminishes, and wins are celebrated collectively
• Build career ladders that attract senior talent and grow designers at every level; make the business case for org investment where it creates the most leverage, and develop the next generation of design leaders from within

Design Strategy & Craft

• Define and drive the UX vision across all of Netskope's products — ensuring experiences are coherent, conceptually grounded, and built around real user needs and workflows
• Stay connected to the work at a level that lets you spot patterns, gaps, and cross-product opportunities — and lead initiatives that build connective tissue across the platform
• Lead the team through the ongoing AI transformation in design practice — not by having all the answers, but by modeling curiosity, creating space to experiment, and helping the team build an AI-aware workflow that reduces busywork without sacrificing the creative and collaborative nature of design

Research & Insights

• Foster a culture where designers feel close to their users: curious, evidence-informed, and empowered to advocate for what they know rather than only what they've been told to build
• Push to embed research throughout the product development process, not as a gate at the end of a cycle, but as an ongoing source of confidence for designers and a de-risking tool for Product and Engineering
• Stay current on how AI is reshaping research practice — from synthesis and analysis to participant recruitment and insight communication — and help the research team evolve accordingly

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with the CPO, Product Management, and Engineering to align design strategy with business goals — shaping roadmaps and influencing decisions before they are made, not after
• Be a persistent, evidence-driven advocate for users: push back with conviction when design is treated as decoration or an afterthought, and use storytelling and data to make the case
• Connect UX outcomes to business metrics — adoption, retention, task success, customer satisfaction — and report on design's impact to the CPO and executive team regularly

Process & Operations

• Define and refine UX processes — from discovery and research to delivery and design system governance — and represent UX in planning and strategic discussions
• Track and report on UX performance metrics, including usability scores, accessibility compliance, and design system adoption, to make the value of design legible to the business
• Identify and pursue opportunities to reduce team friction and raise the quality bar — including exploring DesignOps capabilities and AI-powered workflows where they create real leverage

You are a good fit if you

• Are a natural dot-connector — you build the big picture from many moving parts, make connections across products and teams, and help others see what you see
• Can make the complex feel simple — you distill hard technical concepts to their essence and use analogy and clarity to bring others along
• Lead with empathy and fairness — your team knows you are in their corner, generous with your time, and that their success is your success
• Are patient but relentless about evangelizing design — and know how to speak truth to power when business pressure is masking a bad experience decision
• Are intellectually humble — you hire people who challenge you, welcome expertise that exceeds yours, and believe in growing team members up rather than managing them down
• Speak the language of the business — you frame design outcomes in terms executives act on, and use that fluency to earn resources, influence roadmaps, and grow design's credibility
• Are AI-curious and genuinely engaged — you are already experimenting with how generative AI reshapes design and research practice, you bring that curiosity to your team without forcing conclusions, and you are comfortable leading through change that is still being figured out

Qualifications

• 12+ years of UX experience, with at least 4 years leading design managers and/or senior ICs
• Demonstrated ability to lead UX for complex, technical enterprise products — cybersecurity, networking, infrastructure, or adjacent domains is a strong plus
• Proven track record of driving design strategy and roadmap influence at the VP or Director level, with fluency connecting UX outcomes to business KPIs
• Experience building org structures, career ladders, and making the business case for design team investment at the leadership level
• Experience leading distributed teams across multiple time zones
• Portfolio demonstrating systems thinking, conceptual design, and cross-product initiative driving
• Active, hands-on engagement with AI tools in a design or research context — not just awareness, but evidence of curiosity and experimentation; experience helping a team develop an AI-integrated practice is a strong plus
• Background in UX research, or experience directly leading a research team — familiarity with both exploratory and evaluative methods, and a track record of advocating for research as a strategic function
• Proficiency with Figma and Claude Code (our primary tools); DesignOps experience and design community engagement (speaking, writing, advisory roles) are both a plus

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, or related fields required. Master's degree strongly preferred.