Design Director

Mentimeter is an engagement tool with a clear goal in mind. To turn presentations into conversations. Through real-time interactivity and clear visualizations, we get people to participate, engage and become more productive. Transforming all those passive meetings, airless classrooms and drawn out trainings into valuable and memorable moments. We truly believe that you achieve the best results by doing things together. And that successful leaders need to adopt a curious and collaborative mindset in order to get there. So with you at Mentimeter, you’ll be a big part of the ambition to help over 1 billion people listen, learn and work better together. SUMMER HIRING NOTICE: DUE TO SUMMER VACATIONS, WE WILL BEGIN THE REVIEWING AND INTERVIEWING PROCESS FOR THIS ROLE FROM AUGUST. HOWEVER, WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. THE ROLE At Mentimeter, strategy turns into product in our Areas – groups of teams led by a Product Director, with you owning the engineering alongside them. You'll be one of two Engineering Directors at Mentimeter, sitting in Area Leadership: you own how we build – technical direction, architecture, quality, and engineering leadership – and co-own your Areas' outcomes and trade-offs with your Product Director and Design Director peers. In practice, that means leading 5–8 teams of typically 2–5 engineers each, through your Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers, building a product used by more than 300 million people. Your accountability is the performance of the Product Areas: clear team missions, strong engineering leadership, healthy delivery, and outcomes that ladder into company, technology, and product strategy. This is a senior, high-impact role in a company growing into a multi-product business at global scale. WHAT THIS ROLE IS It is a technical leadership role. Together with your Staff Engineers – the bar-setters who lead the craft inside the teams – you own technical direction and architectural coherence across your Areas: the standards for how we build, and an engineering-quality bar that holds. You set and evolve that technical strategy with them; it does not arrive from somewhere else. It is also a business leadership role. You reason about customer outcomes, capacity, and investment, not just engineering. Build-vs-borrow-vs-buy calls land on your desk, and we expect you to ground them in a business context. It is a role where you lead through leaders. Your job is to grow Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers who grow great engineers. If your instinct is to be the smartest engineer in the room, this will frustrate you. It is not a delivery management role. Delivery belongs to the teams, not to you or your Engineering Managers, and we place heavy trust in them to run it. EMs grow engineers; you create the conditions: ownership so unambiguous that escalations are rare, and decision boundaries so clear that autonomy actually works. It is not a role where strategy is handed to you. You grab ambiguity unfazed and create clarity for others, in a company that keeps changing shape as it grows. It is not a hands-off role either. This is not a role for leaders who think of themselves as engineering adjacent. You stay close enough to the technology to challenge and be challenged. WHAT YOU'LL DO TURN STRATEGY INTO OUTCOMES * Translate company, technology, and product strategy into clear team missions, boundaries, and success measures. * Keep technology and product strategy tightly aligned: shared priorities, shared trade-offs, shared outcomes. * Own the Areas' outcomes together with your Product and Design peers, from planning through delivery. OWN HOW WE BUILD * Own technical direction and architectural coherence across your Areas – the systems hang together as teams move fast. * Set the engineering-quality bar with your Staff Engineers: the standards for how we build and review, held consistently across teams. * Move your Areas toward agentic development – make AI part of how every team builds, and own that shift as an outcome, not an experiment. CREATE THE CONDITIONS FOR AUTONOMOUS TEAMS * Give teams unambiguous ownership, a clear mission, and known decision boundaries. That is what autonomy is built on. * Build a native product-engineering culture where engineers participate in discovery and work from customer and business outcomes. ALLOCATE CAPACITY AND INVESTMENTS * Allocate engineering capacity across teams, and rebalance as priorities change. * Make trade-offs at Area level rather than inside individual teams, and decide where engineering effort creates the most value. * Drive build-vs-borrow-vs-buy decisions with long-term business impact in mind. Budget, headcount, and tooling follow strategy. LEAD THE LEADERS * Coach and grow your Engineering Managers and the Areas' Staff Engineers, and hold them accountable for the growth of their engineers and systems. * Raise the leadership bar: calibrate how your leaders show up across their teams, and step in early when a team needs more. * Build the next generation of engineering leadership through hiring, feedback, and honest development conversations. KEEP DELIVERY HEALTHY * Balance speed, quality, and technical investment so the Areas deliver without heroics. * Resolve cross-team and cross-Area dependencies before they become bottlenecks. * Spot weak signals in team delivery and technical direction, and course-correct early. * Make technical debt visible and deliberately managed, not discovered in firefights. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE * Every team in your Areas can explain its mission, ownership, and success criteria – and has the autonomy to act on them. * Engineering investments clearly ladder into product, technology, and company strategy. * The architecture stays coherent as teams move fast, and the engineering-quality bar holds across your Areas. * Your Areas are visibly further along on agentic development – AI is part of how every team builds, and you can show the shift. * Product and Design pull engineering into decisions early – because they want to, not because they have to. * Your Engineering Managers grow visibly, and engineers' craft grows because of them. * The Areas deliver against their goals, and hold that pace under pressure. * Issues surface early; late-stage reversals and escalations are rare. HOW YOU LEAD, AND HOW AI RUNS THROUGH IT You lead with heart and bravery: you care personally about people and decide courageously, in line with our leadership commitment. You balance care and challenge, supporting your leaders while holding a high bar. You multiply through others. And you are AI-native. Not as an initiative, but as an instinct. AI runs through how you work, how you think, and how you lead – and you are actively rethinking what an engineering organization looks like when AI is part of how every team builds. Pushing the craft forward is part of who you are: you want to be at the forefront of the move from a software development lifecycle to an agentic one – from SDLC to ADLC. We are working this out in practice at Mentimeter, and you will help set the patterns the rest of the company learns from. WE BELIEVE YOU HAVE * You were an excellent engineer before you were a leader: deep fluency in code, systems, and your domain, now extended into how AI changes all three. That foundation carried you into leading teams, and then into leading the leaders of teams. * Five or more years of engineering leadership at scale: you have led Engineering Managers and senior staff across an organization of 50+ engineers, with a track record of growing them and the business. * Experience owning engineering across multiple teams in a product company, ideally at Area or department level. * A habit of turning strategy into team scope, priorities, and measurable outcomes. * Experience allocating capacity and making investment trade-offs across teams, not only within one. * Strong product instincts: you work from user and business outcomes, not delivery tasks. * A track record of owning technical direction and architecture across multiple teams, and keeping it coherent as they scale. * Commercial judgment: you ground investment calls in business context. * Experience leading through change: restructures, migrations, and ever-shifting priorities. It is beneficial if you have * Experience from product-led B2B SaaS. * Hands-on experience leading teams through the shift to AI-driven engineering. * Experience reshaping organizations as they change along with their needs. NOT REQUIRED * Swedish is not required. Daily work is carried out in English and the Mentimeter team currently boasts 50+ nationalities. * A cover letter is not required as part of your application. At Mentimeter, we believe in fair and transparent compensation that grows with you. The salary range for this role is SEK 88,000–SEK 102,000 per month. It’s intentionally broad to reflect the different stages of growth within the role: from early development to deep expertise and meaningful impact. Where an individual is placed within the range depends on factors such as relevant experience, demonstrated skills, and alignment with the role’s requirements. We’re committed to supporting your growth. You’ll have ongoing development conversations with your manager, and your salary will evolve as you build skills and contribute to our mission. In addition to your monthly salary, we offer a comprehensive benefits package—learn more about it here: https://www.mentimeter.com/benefits/stockholm. What Mentimeter can offer At Mentimeter we can offer a diverse and inclusive work environment supported by smart and driven colleagues. We believe in continuous professional development for all of our colleagues and therefore offer access to a leadership program (including external personal coach) and relevant education to ensure that we continue to be state-of-the-art when it comes to innovating and building Mentimeter. Your place will be in a growing company with lots of career opportunities, working on a beloved product used by more than 300 million people. It’s not all about work though, we also offer a very healthy view on work-life balance. All of this comes attached with a competitive compensation and benefits package, including pension contributions. Learn more about our benefits by visiting our Benefits & Perks page AI and Hiring at Mentimeter At Mentimeter, we believe AI helps us work smarter - but it never replaces the human assessment, curiosity, and personal connection that define our culture and our hiring. We use AI as a sparring partner: to bounce ideas, bring new perspectives, support structure, and make our work more efficient. But the meaning, decisions, and interactions always come from people. * AI does not screen or decide on candidates. *  There is no automated filtering, ranking, or decision-making in our recruitment process. Every application is reviewed by a person. * Hiring teams may use AI to support their work - for example, to structure notes, prepare interview questions, or organize their thinking. AI strengthens our work, but it does not define it. At Mentimeter, we’re not building an AI-driven hiring process - we’re building a people-first culture, where technology helps us listen, learn, and grow together. Culture at Mentimeter At Mentimeter we believe in giving everyone a voice - regardless of who you are. So we build a platform that does just that. Our platform is not only our product but also our organization. A platform where people feel safe, where differences are embraced, a place where you can have fun. We strongly encourage applicants who are people of color, LGBTQ+, women, people with disabilities, and/or formerly incarcerated people, and a college degree is not strictly required. In order to give everyone a voice, we need to be as diverse as our users. Learn more about our culture by visiting our Culture page. Review our Privacy Policy for more information.