Design Leader, Software Design

Our mission at Oura is to empower every person to own their inner potential. Our award-winning products help our global community gain a deeper knowledge of their readiness, activity, and sleep quality by using their Oura Ring and its connected app. We've helped millions of people understand and improve their health by providing daily insights and practical steps to inspire healthy lifestyles. Empowering the world starts with living our values and empowering our team. As a quickly growing company focused on helping people live healthier and happier lives, we ensure that our team members have what they need to do their best work — both in and out of the office. We are looking for a Design Leader of Software Design to lead the end-to-end experience of Oura’s software products, with a primary focus on our member-facing mobile and web experiences. This role sits alongside our most senior individual contributors and is expected to operate in high ambiguity, set a clear design vision, and create enduring, company-level impact across multiple product areas. You will build, lead, and mentor a multi-disciplinary design organization, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Data, and Brand to deliver coherent, insight-driven experiences across Oura’s ecosystem. You are accountable for raising the bar across four core dimensions: Operational Excellence (craft & execution), Impact (strategy & product value), Collaboration (communication & alignment), and Leadership (culture & people). This is a highly collaborative, hands-on leadership role based in Helsinki with a hybrid work model. What you will do: Lead and develop a high-performing design organization You manage software design teams, overseeing multiple designers and design leads. You create the conditions for excellent work: clear expectations, strong feedback structures, and genuine investment in people’s growth. Your management style builds trust while holding a consistently high bar for design quality. Mentor and develop designers You invest in the people around you. You support designers at all levels through regular 1:1s, career conversations, and honest, actionable feedback. You help them see around corners, develop their craft, and grow their confidence, not just their output. Set a compelling, coherent design vision You define what great looks like for Oura’s member-facing experiences across mobile and web and you make that vision concrete and actionable for the team. You bring systems thinking to the full experience: flows, states, transitions, information hierarchy, microcopy, and the moments between interactions that make or break how a product feels. Elevate craft through active participation You are in the room for the work that matters. You lead critiques and working sessions that meaningfully improve what the team produces, not by overriding, but by modeling stronger thinking, asking sharper questions, and holding the quality line. Your presence raises the bar without taking over. Define and steward the design system You treat the design system as a lever for coherence and velocity, not overhead. You work with design leads to evolve it as the product scales, ensuring it reflects Oura’s visual language and interaction standards across every surface. Partner with product and engineering without ceding design authority You build strong working relationships with product leadership and collaborate on roadmap priorities but you bring a distinct design perspective to those conversations. You know when to push back on pressures that would compromise the member experience, and you do it with clarity and respect. Build and steward the team You play an active role in recruiting, hiring, and onboarding designers. You help define what the team needs, and you bring the same rigor to hiring decisions that you bring to design decisions. Over time, you help shape the culture, norms, and practices that make the team exceptional. Champion AI-enabled design workflows You lead initi