Lead, Design Architect - Customer Experience

Unlock the Power of You

At Invitation Homes, our associates are the foundation of our success. We connect your work to real impact, invest in your growth, and welcome you to feel at home — because care isn't just something we say, it's something you experience.

Invitation Homes owns and operates homes in great neighborhoods across 16 top U.S. markets. We continue to innovate with smart home technology, an industry-leading maintenance app, and other lifestyle-enhancing services that make leasing easier than owning.

Our market teams — Leasing, Property Management, and Rehab, Turns & Maintenance — work together to deliver excellent resident experiences and maintain high-quality homes. Every associate plays a meaningful role in that mission.

What you’ll do day-to-day

The Lead, Design Architect - Customer Experience, is the design authority and voice for Invitation Homes' customer-facing digital experience. This is a purpose-built, lead-level role created to centralize how the company designs, measures, and improves the digital tools and workflows that our customers use every day.

Owning the experience holistically across platforms, journeys, and teams, this role drives meaningful change with enterprise visibility and influence. Reporting to the Sr. Director of DXD, it plays a key role in advancing the company’s Center of Excellence vision.

This is not a traditional XO role—it blends experience ownership, design architecture, research, and data fluency. Success requires experience with ambiguity, strong customer connection, and the credibility to advocate for customers.

Customer Experience Design Authority

• Serve as the design authority and experience owner for customer-facing digital experiences
• Lead the design and experience strategy across key platforms (Website, Mobile App, Search, Application, Portal, etc. ) and co-own with the Sr. Director of DXD
• Refine experience standards, interaction patterns, and design principles for customer workflows
• Embed experience design thinking into CoE workflows, prioritization, and decision-making

Customer/XO/MXG Engagement & Insight Generation

• Build strong relationships with the customer experts (Customer Experience, Experience Owners, Product/Technology) to identify friction points and translate them into prioritized design and tooling opportunities
• Represent the customer perspective in cross-functional planning, roadmap reviews, and strategy sessions
• Document and share insights to build lasting institutional knowledge

Analytics, Feedback Loops & Adoption Tracking

• Track feature adoption and assess alignment with intended experience outcomes
• Conduct ongoing system usability assessments with associates
• Establish and maintain feedback mechanisms between customers and DXD/product/technology teams
• Report on experience performance, surfacing gaps, wins, and opportunities
• Work with XOs to identify and elevate opportunities to close visibility gaps in customer experience data
• Establish a forward-looking view of customer experience priorities

AI-Assisted Design, Vibe Coding & Rapid Prototyping

• Leverage vibe coding and AI-assisted design to rapidly translate insights into testable concepts
• Prototype alternative workflows, tool interactions, and experience improvements across customer platforms
• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI design tooling that accelerates design and innovation

Experimentation & Design-Led Testing

• Partner closely with the Director of Experimentation to co-develop insight-driven hypotheses
• Lead design of experience experiments for customer-facing tools, from concept through analysis
• Design with testability in mind—structuring variants, workflows, and interactions to drive measurable outcomes
• Embrace A/B testing and experimentation as standard practice in validating customer experience changes
• Support the XO experimentation model, with XOs owning experiment backlogs and DXD serving as the methodology and execution expert

Early Discovery & UX Research Partnership

• Partner with UX Research early in discovery to co-design research approaches, translate insights into real-time design direction, and validate ideas before prototyping or experimentation
• Champion continuous discovery as an ongoing discipline

Change Management for Experience Improvements

• Support change management for customer experience improvements
• Design adoption and communication strategies for new tools, processes, and improvements
• Partner with Operations, HR, and Training to ensure effective rollout and readiness
• Monitor and communicate adoption and sentiment

Backlog Advocacy & Cross-Functional Influence

• Advocate for customer needs in product and technology prioritization decisions
• Act as the liaison between CX associates and product/technology partners,
• Inform/Educate cross-functional stakeholders to align on customer experience improvements
• Provide experience-driven input to inform roadmap planning for customer-facing products

What You Bring

Required

• 5+ years of experience in product design, experience design, UX, or digital product ownership — with demonstrated focus on customer experience
• Strong web and mobile app knowledge — able to evaluate, map, and influence workflows and identify UX/experience gaps without engineering dependency
• Proven experience conducting customer experience research, usability assessments, and qualitative insight gathering
• Analytically experienced — familiar with feature adoption data, usability metrics, funnel analysis, and building or interpreting feedback dashboards
• Demonstrated cross-functional influence — ability to advocate effectively with product, operations, engineering, and executive stakeholders without formal authority
• Comfort with ambiguity and building rapport while hitting the ground running — this role is embracing something old and something new; the person needs to be energized by that, not paralyzed
• Great communication skills — able to translate digital and real-world reality into design strategy recommendations and vice versa

Strongly Preferred

• Hands-on experience with AI-assisted design tools, vibe coding, or rapid prototyping — comfortable producing high-fidelity concepts at speed without full engineering support
• Experience with A/B testing, experimentation frameworks, or structured hypothesis development
• Experience partnering with UX Research in early discovery — co-designing research approaches, not just receiving findings
• Background in change management or organizational adoption of new tools and processes for field-based workforces
• Experience in real estate, property management, multifamily residential, or an operationally complex service industry
• Comfort working in a matrixed org structure where influence is more powerful than authority
• Experience working within or building toward a Center of Excellence or pod-based operating model

Why Invitation Homes

We believe when our residents thrive, our associates thrive. Here, you're not just filling a role — you're building a career at a company that invests in your growth and welcomes you for who you are.

What's in it for you

• Competitive pay and annual bonus program for all associates
• Generous PTO including vacation accrual, sick time, volunteer time, and standard and floating holidays
• 401(k) with company matching contributions
• Casual dress code and a genuinely great work environment
• Team events, celebrations, and a culture that values connection
• Employee Resource Groups: Together with Women, Asian Alliance, Black Collective, Juntos, Gen Next, and Open Invitation
• Career growth paths and learning opportunities — we promote from within

To attract and retain top talent, we're pleased to offer competitive compensation and benefits, including:

• Annual bonus program

• Health, dental, vision, and life insurance

• Long-term and short-term disability insurance

• Generous paid time off plans include vacation accrual, sick time, standard holidays and floating holidays

• 401(k) with company matching contributions

• Awesome work environment with casual dress

• Team events and gatherings (Pre- and Post-Covid)

Invitation Homes is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive and innovative environment with the best associates. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, Veteran status or any other factor protected by applicable federal, state or local law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact us at [email protected].

To all recruitment agencies: Invitation Homes does not accept agency resumes.  Please do not forward resumes to Invitation Homes employees.  Invitation Homes is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.