---
title: 'Director, Experience Design at Proto'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-experience-design-proto-new-york-new-york-tgmbnqwf59pm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Director, Experience Design at Proto

- **Company:** Proto
- **Location:** New York New York, United States
- **Posted:** 2026-08-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/proto/jobs/6148882004

## Job description

Director, Experience Design

Proto leads innovation and transformation efforts for large organizations, often through the creation of new products, services, and platforms. The work involves understanding user needs, system behavior, and technical possibilities, and using that understanding to design solutions that are coherent, usable, and grounded in real constraints.

The Director, Experience Design owns experience direction on our most demanding engagements. Our starting premise is that complexity is usually a symptom of ambiguous intent, and that the way through it is to organize the system around behavior: what people are trying to do, which of those behaviors create the most value, and what structure best serves them. Directors translate that into artifacts clients can see and judge, from behavior maps and journeys to service models and working prototypes, early enough to shape a decision rather than decorate one already made. The role is hands-on and accountable. You set the direction, make the work, lead the team doing it, and own whether it holds up in front of a C-suite.

## What You Will Do

- Own experience direction by setting the design point of view on an engagement, defining experience principles and goals, and holding the work to them from framing through delivery;
- Organize systems around behavior: model how work actually gets done across users, systems, and touchpoints, identify where value concentrates, and use that to define what the system should be;
- Make the future tangible by bringing prototypes, demos, and simulations upstream so clients can evaluate a direction while it is still cheap to change, calibrating fidelity to the decision at hand;
- Carry work from concept to pilot, moving ideas through sketches, wireframes, and proofs of concept into piloting and execution, and staying involved as real-world feedback reshapes the design;
- Lead client decision-making by facilitating working sessions and presenting to executive audiences clearly and directly, using narrative and concrete artifacts to move decisions forward;
- Build and lead the team: manage and develop designers, set clear expectations, give direct feedback, and own delivery end-to-end so complexity resolves at your level rather than escalating;
- Advance the Experience practice by contributing to internal methods, patterns, and external points of view, and help define what Experience Design at Proto is as the department grows.

## Qualifications

- 10+ years of experience in experience design, service design, interaction design, or systems design within innovation, consultancy, product, or venture-building contexts;
- Undergraduate and/or graduate degree in design, human-centered computing, psychology, engineering, or a related field;
- Proven ability to own complex projects from early framing through delivery, with a portfolio showing systems-level judgment and depth of thinking, not just surface polish;
- Fluency in journey mapping, interaction modeling, service blueprints, prototyping, and usability evaluation combined with an understanding of technical constraints, tradeoffs, and system behavior;
- Experience turning ambiguous, high-stakes problems into structured design direction that informs product, investment, or organizational decisions;
- Proven ability to lead senior stakeholders through uncertainty, and to make design decisions legible to people who are not designers;
- Experience managing and developing designers, with evidence that people got measurably better working for you;
- Operational resilience, including the ability to maintain quality under pressure, manage multiple workstreams, and work through periods of intensity and change;
- Good judgment and low ego. Able to stay calm under pressure and handle disagreement constructively.

In New York City, the base salary for this position is $170,000-$190,000. Individual compensation varies based on job-related factors including years of relevant skills and experience, level of responsibility, and qualifications. This position is based out of the New York office and reports into our Partner, Managing Director of Experience.

Proto is a New York based company with offices at 120 Broadway, 34th Floor. Our staff is encouraged to work-from-office on days of their choosing based on personal preferences, collaboration moments, client meetings, and all-company gatherings. We also support workplace flexibility and have made work-from-anywhere available to all staff (within a 3-hour time zone of eastern standard time zone). Our core business hours are generally 9:30am-6:00pm EST; however, due to our client service model and collaborative working culture, individual working hours fluctuate to reflect client deadlines and deliverables.

Interested in applying? Right this way.

## About Proto

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Proto provides inclusive AI workflows for emerging markets, specializing in sovereign AI solutions for regulators, public services, and enterprises.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Waterloo, Canada (with regional hubs in Kigali, Rwanda and Bonifacio Global City, Philippines)
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Curtis Matlock (CEO), with co-founders Noella Dushime, Nino Columna, Weiying Kok, and Andy Jung

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: AI, government technology, financial services, healthcare, telecommunications
- **Target customers**: B2B – central banks, government agencies, healthcare providers, financial institutions, telcos; primarily in emerging markets (Africa, Southeast Asia)
- **Mission**: “Deploy inclusive AI workflows” and “ensure equal access to AI regardless of language, income or geography”

## Products & Services
- **Proto AI Agent**: Multilingual, multimodal AI agent for customer engagement, grievance redress, scam reporting, and dispute resolution. Supports voice, text, and local languages. Deployed on sovereign infrastructure.
- **Inbox Co-pilot**: AI-powered mediation and translation tool that resolves disputes by training on conversation history.
- **Insight Advisor**: Analytics and emotion analysis engine that generates actionable insights from customer interactions and workspace data.
- **Embedded Advisors & Co-pilots**: Customizable AI assistants for regulated entities (HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 compliant).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding – Series A raised in 2022 (amount not publicly disclosed). Processes over 35 million AI interactions across 20+ languages as of 2025.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Gates Foundation, Government of Canada, African Development Bank, National Bank of Rwanda, Central Bank of the Philippines, The Medical City, PhilCare, FINCA. Accelerator alumni of NextAI and Creative Destruction Lab. Recognized by Inclusive Fintech 50 (Visa, MetLife, IFC, Accion) and G20 TechSprint.
- **Growth Signals**: Expanded into Sub-Saharan Africa (2021), partnered with Gates Foundation and Canada’s government for national AI systems (2024), recognized by G20 TechSprint for grievance redress work (2025). Focus on anti-scam, patient experience, and insight advisor use cases (2026).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Sovereign AI deployments**: Models run on dedicated, locally hosted infrastructure, appealing to governments and regulated entities.
- **Local language support**: Covers low-resource and mixed languages (e.g., Tagalog, Kinyarwanda) that major AI platforms ignore.
- **Security & compliance**: SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR – critical for public sector and healthcare clients.
- **Reverse innovation**: Builds and proves AI in emerging markets before redeploying in developed economies.
- **Deep domain expertise**: Focus on grievance redress, financial inclusion, and patient experience – niche but high-impact.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Anti-scam center, patient experience optimization, and Insight Advisor use cases to maximize social impact.
- **Growth direction**: Scaling sovereign AI across more low- and middle-income countries, deepening partnerships with central banks and health ministries.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-first**: Full remote work from anywhere with stable internet.
- **Culture & values**: Strong emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion; refugee-friendly hiring; global team spanning Asia, Africa, and North America.
- **Compensation & perks**: High & equal salaries (location-adjusted), stock options for leadership roles, visa support, tech device reimbursement, and company retreats.
- **Impact**: Work on projects that directly improve financial inclusion, healthcare access, and citizen engagement in underserved communities.
- **Engineering culture**: Multinational team led by NLP experts; focus on practical AI for real-world constraints (low bandwidth, local languages).

## Sources
1. [proto.cx/careers](https://www.proto.cx/careers)
2. [proto.cx](https://www.proto.cx/)
3. [proto.cx/about](https://www.proto.cx/about)
4. [LinkedIn](https://ca.linkedin.com/company/proto-cx)
5. [FlexJobs](https://www.flexjobs.com/remote-jobs/company/protocx)

## Other roles at Proto

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- [Director, Marketing & Communications Strategy](https://feeny.ai/job/director-marketing-communications-strategy-proto-new-york-new-york-kzrax7wc8rfz) — New York New York, United States
- [General Applications](https://feeny.ai/job/general-applications-proto-new-york-new-york-1dbvpexwj0h4) — New York New York, United States