Back to all jobs

CoStar Group are hiring a

Director of UX Design

Director of UX Design

Job Description

OVERVIEW

CoStar Group (NASDAQ: CSGP) is a leading global provider of commercial and residential real estate information, analytics, and online marketplaces. Included in the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100, CoStar Group is on a mission to digitize the world’s real estate, empowering all people to discover properties, insights, and connections that improve their businesses and lives. CoStar Debt Solutions works at the intersection of commercial real estate lending and advanced data intelligence. Our platform supports the full CRE lending lifecycle: from sourcing and screening through underwriting, closing, and active portfolio surveillance. Our clients range from commercial banks and insurance companies to debt funds, pension funds, government agencies, and rating agencies. We are building on two parallel fronts; a greenfield loan origination and underwriting platform built on a where the schema is the product and relationships between entities are first-class citizens; and the modernization of our established asset management product, which is relied upon daily by sophisticated institutional clients. The Director of UX Design will lead design strategy across both.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Director of UX Design to lead design across our origination, underwriting, and asset management platform. This is a senior individual-contributor-plus-leadership role: you will be a hands-on designer and a strategic voice in how we build and evolve our product. On the origination side, you will shape how loan officers navigate a live deal pipeline, how underwriters interact with complex cash flow projections and multi-tranche capital stacks, how analysts interrogate sponsor and collateral relationships, and how the system surfaces AI-driven sourcing intelligence. On the asset management side, you will lead a careful, high-stakes modernization: bringing a mature product forward without disrupting the workflows that experienced users have built their practices around. These two challenges require different design muscles and we need someone who can hold both simultaneously. The ability to move fluidly between greenfield innovation and disciplined, user-anchored modernization is the defining skill of this role. This position reports to product leadership and works in close collaboration with engineers, architects, and domain experts in CRE lending. It is onsite in Boston, MA.

ABOUT YOU

You are drawn to problems that resist simple solutions. You understand that enterprise software design is not about decoration; it is about reducing cognitive load for experts working under pressure with high-stakes data. You have an instinct for information hierarchy and a sharp eye for when complexity in the UI signals a design failure, not a data reality. You have modernized products before. You know that rewriting a mature product’s interface from scratch without deep respect for existing mental models is how you lose users’ trust. You know how to audit what is working, carefully evolve the navigational and behavioral patterns that users rely on, and introduce a new design language incrementally, creating coherence across old and new surfaces rather than a jarring split. You are someone who:

  • Reads a data schema the way others read a brief; you see the domain in the structure
  • Understands that a capital stack is not a list, it is a hierarchy with relationships and constraints
  • Thinks about underwriting workflows not as form flows, but as staged decision processes with compliance gates, version history, and audit trails
  • Knows how to approach legacy product modernization with discipline: feature audits, usage analysis, migration planning, and change management for power users
  • Is curious about data structure and how it shapes UI: you naturally ask how entities relate to each other and what that means for navigation, hierarchy, and information display
  • Treats AI-surfaced insights as a design challenge: how do you present a recommendation in a way that earns trust rather than demanding it
  • Balances the pull of innovation with the responsibility of continuity and knows when each deserves priority
  • Advocates for the user without losing sight of the business objectives the product must serve

A portfolio demonstrating your work on complex, data-dense enterprise applications is required. Examples of legacy product modernization work are strongly preferred.

RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Own end-to-end design for the origination platform and the asset management product, from origination and underwriting through portfolio surveillance and risk reporting
  • Lead the strategic modernization of the existing AM product: feature auditing, design system migration, and coherence planning across old and new surfaces
  • Develop and maintain a shared design system that serves both products, with clear principles for when components are shared and when they are product-specific
  • Lead design for complex data visualization challenges: capital stacks, underwriting waterfalls, portfolio dashboards, stress testing surfaces, and geographic intelligence
  • Translate complex, relationship-rich data models into intuitive, navigable UI patterns that reflect real domain complexity without recreating it
  • Partner with product managers and engineers to define requirements, challenge assumptions, and drive toward solutions that are both technically achievable and genuinely usable
  • Communicate design decisions and rationale to executive stakeholders, grounding recommendations in user research, domain understanding, and measured continuity risk
  • Manage and mentor a small team of designers, setting standards for craft, process, and documentation
  • Define and track design quality metrics in partnership with product analytics, including adoption signals during the AM modernization

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

  • Bachelor’s degree from an accredited, in-person not-for-profit university or college
  • 8+ years of UX/product design experience, with at least 3 years in a senior or lead role
  • 3+ years managing designers or a design function
  • Demonstrated experience designing complex enterprise applications with high information density
  • Demonstrated experience modernizing or evolving a mature product with an established user base
  • Strong systems thinking: ability to design components that work individually and compose coherently across a large, multi-product surface
  • Expert proficiency in Figma for wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, interactive prototypes, and design systems
  • Exceptional communication skills; can articulate design decisions to engineering teams and to C-suite stakeholders with equal clarity
  • Track record of commitment to prior employers
  • Portfolio required: must include examples of data-dense enterprise design and at least one legacy product modernization

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

  • Experience designing financial, lending, investment management, or risk analytics applications
  • Familiarity with commercial real estate concepts: cap rates, DSCR, LTV, loan structures, capital stacks, or portfolio surveillance
  • Comfort working closely with data models and understanding how underlying data structure influences UI architecture and navigation patterns
  • Experience designing for AI or ML-powered products, particularly in professional or analytical contexts
  • Proficiency with data visualization tools and charting libraries (Recharts, D3, Chart.js, or equivalent)
  • Experience with workflow design: staged processes, approval gates, audit trails, and state management patterns
  • Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and React component architecture; enough to collaborate fluently with engineers and understand implementation constraints
  • Experience with user research, usability testing, and analytics tools
  • Familiarity with design token systems and theming (dark/light mode, multi-tenant visual identity)
  • Experience developing and socializing design principles for managing change in products with entrenched, expert user bases

What’s in it for you?

When you join CoStar Group, you’ll experience a collaborative and innovative culture working alongside the best and brightest to empower our people and customers to succeed. We offer you generous compensation and performance-based incentives. CoStar Group also invests in your professional and academic growth with internal training, and tuition reimbursement. Our benefits package includes (but is not limited to):

  • Comprehensive healthcare coverage: Medical / Vision / Dental / Prescription Drug
  • Life, legal, and supplementary insurance
  • Virtual and in-person mental health counseling services for individuals and family
  • Commuter and parking benefits
  • 401(K) retirement plan with matching contributions
  • Employee stock purchase plan
  • Paid time off
  • Tuition reimbursement
  • On-site fitness center and/or reimbursed fitness center membership costs (location dependent)
  • Access to CoStar Group’s Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Employee Resource Groups
  • Complimentary gourmet coffee, tea, hot chocolate, fresh fruit, and other healthy snacks

This position offers an annual base salary range of $, based on relevant skills and experience and includes a generous benefits plan. We welcome all qualified candidates who are currently eligible to work full-time in the United States to apply. However, please note that CoStar Group is not able to provide visa sponsorship for this position.
CoStar Group is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer; we maintain a drug-free workplace and perform pre-employment substance abuse testing.