Cultural Institute Design Lead

This position is based in Paris, France.

The area: Knowledge

There is always more information out there, and the Knowledge team has a never-ending quest to find it and make it accessible. We're constantly refining our signature search engine to provide better results, and developing offerings like Google Instant, Google Voice Search and Google Image Search to make it faster and more engaging. We're providing users around the world with great search results every day, but at Google, great just isn't good enough. We're just getting started.

The role: Cultural Institute Design Lead

The mantra of the the User Interface (UI) team is: "Focus on the user and all else will follow". As a UI Designer, you have a strong technical background and work closely with Engineers and Product Managers to design products that are simple but great for the user, focusing on interaction and visual design. Using your keen design aesthetic you design and conduct experiments with real users so that improvements to the user experience are based on real user behavior. Your job is to make sure that our products are intuitive, accessible and usable to our millions of users.

You design and lead the UI construction for complex projects with a broad scope and evolving objectives. You contribute to the overall product strategy through concept generation, prototyping and collaboration with with UX team to promote feature integration, as well as working with researchers to design user experiments to test your designs.

The Google Cultural Institute is an initiative launched in 2011 as part of the opening of a new Google Engineering center in Paris. Its goal is to drive innovation in cultural preservation and access, not just in France, but across the world. A key project of the Cultural Institute is to build a platform for cultural institutions to bring their content online in formats that will be easy accessible to broad audiences. This platform consists of services and tools that will help institutions digitize physical material, store it online, and serve it via new and innovative user experiences.

As an Cultural Institute Design Lead you will be responsible for leading a team of designers to craft the user experience across an array of related Cultural Institute products - including Art Project, History Project, Cultural Platform, World Wonders, across web, tablet, mobile. You and your team will work with cross-functional partners to establish a design process, nurture a design culture, and drive polished, delightful experiences in shipping products. You will be involved in all aspects of design, from idea conception to shipping product and everything in between. You will be a self-starter with excellent design sense, outstanding communication skills, an intuition for leadership and audacious design ambitions. You will know how to care for and lead a team of creative professionals through blue-sky exploration and quotidian feature specification with equal skill and attention, and recognize that design is only as good as it’s implemented.

This role requires leadership and also hands on UX design both for the tools for digitizing and managing content, as well as for the consumer experience for that content. You are a visual designer to work in conjunction with product and engineering teams to bring a high caliber look-and-feel to all user-facing aspects of the project. You are someone with an appreciation for subtlety and great attention to detail who can help us create designs that are simple, elegant and beautiful. This role is for a UX lead designer with particular emphasis on Visual Design skills and experience.