VP of Research and Design - Airalo

About Airalo

At Airalo, we're making it easier for people to stay connected wherever they travel. As the world's first eSIM store, we help millions of travelers access affordable mobile data in 200+ countries and regions around the world.

Today, we're a team of 400+ people across 60+ countries, building a product used by travelers every day. We've grown quickly, but we've worked hard to keep what matters: trust, ownership, and the freedom for people to do great work without unnecessary layers or bureaucracy.

We're fully remote by design, genuinely global, and united by a shared mission to make travel simpler for everyone.

Role Overview

Airalo built the world's first eSIM marketplace. Today, most of our customers buy a data plan for a trip, use it, and come back the next time they fly. We are building something people install once and keep—a product that works at home as well as abroad.

The industry we came out of spent decades building walls: fine print, fair-use policies, unexpected roaming charges, and contracts designed to be hard to leave. We are taking those down with clarity and care. Most of that is design work—making complicated underlying machinery disappear for the customer.

We are looking for a design leader to take us there. Reporting to the Chief Product Officer, you will serve as a peer to the leaders of Consumer Product and B2B Product.

Role Details

• Location: Remote, anywhere in Spain, the UK, or the UAE.
• Contract Types:
  • Spain: Full-time permanent (contrato indefinido) via Deel
  • UK: Full-time permanent (local contract)
  • UAE: Full-time permanent via Deel
• Languages: English (fluent in meetings and asynchronous communication)

Compensation

Salary ranges by location:

• UK: £168,000 – £252,000
• Spain: €154,000 – €185,000
• UAE: 684,400 – 1,026,600 AED

Specific placement within these bands depends on location and local market rates.

What You Own

• Every Surface (Consumer & Business): On consumer, own acquisition, conversion, customer experience, retention, core systems, Airalo One, and new bets. On B2B, own reseller experience, corporate experience, and partner onboarding. Make everything feel like one cohesive relationship.
• Design Strategy: Define what the product should feel like in two years, which bets get us there, and what we deliberately choose not to do.
• Research & Design Integration: Lead the product design guild and the research team, ensuring research shapes strategy rather than just answering requests.
• In-Product Brand: Co-author brand with Marketing. Own how the brand is felt in-product: design system, typography, color, motion, haptics, photography, and copy tone.
• Quality as a System: Define what finished means and hold authority to enforce it: a unified design system, native accessibility, and UX writing treated as core design.

Your First Year

• Land the brand evolution inside the product, using our flagship connectivity launch as the vehicle.
• Elevate the app experience from viable to lovable: micro-animations, haptics, and native-feeling patterns for iOS and Android.
• Set the roadmap for the design system and accessibility standards.
• Define working boundaries between design and product management.
• Shift research from answering validation questions to setting strategic direction.
• Establish a clear career framework for design and research.
• Design and execute the organizational shape and hiring plan for the team.

Requirements

• Scale & Depth: Proven track record leading design for a scaled business across an entire product ecosystem. Deep consumer depth required; professional/B2B experience is a strong advantage.
• Research Leadership: Experience leading or working closely with user research, using it for strategic insight beyond mere validation.
• Strategic Track Record: Demonstrated ability to write a design strategy, align leadership around it, and execute it.
• Craft Proximity: Strong design judgment with the ability to provide meaningful direction on product screens and systems.
• People Leadership: Experience developing designers into leads and leads into managers.
• Commercial Fluency: Ability to articulate design decisions and strategy in business and commercial terms.
• Systems Mindset: Focus on scalable systems rather than one-off solutions; understanding the long-term maintenance costs of design systems.