Director of Design & Development

Salary: $120,000–$125,000. With top performance, you are also eligible to become a shareholder in our company and earn equity.

Benefits: FREE employee-only medical coverage under one of our plans. FREE short-term disability (STD) and FREE life insurance coverage. Plus, a 4% employer match with our 401(k).

Location: We will be making one hire located in either NYC, Chicago or in a major metropolitan area on the West Coast. This role will work from home with travel as needed, but must permnantly reside in one of these locations.

Reports to: Our VP of Design & Development

Your Mission

Your mission is to own the delivery of multiple amenity-focused design projects across Playbook’s national portfolio, from creative concepting to technical execution. You’ll work closely with internal strategy and operations teams to bring physical spaces to life that blend hospitality, wellness, and workplace innovation. This role is ideal for an ambitious designer or architect who has run projects before and is ready to take a major step forward, building both leadership and architectural coordination skills within a high-growth, high-volume team.

Your Legacy

As a result of your time in this role, Playbook delivered exceptional tenant experiences across a growing portfolio of high-performance amenity spaces. You grew quickly into a confident design leader, running workshops, managing consultant coordination, and delivering some of the most exciting projects in our pipeline. Your contributions helped scale one of the most dynamic and design-forward areas of our business.

What You're Responsible For:

Project Leadership: Run multiple concurrent design projects from concept packages to construction documentation. Lead internal design development, drawing reviews, and consultant coordination. Act as the day-to-day point of contact for architecture, engineering, and construction teams.
Workshop Execution: Support and eventually lead design-focused workshops with ownership, leasing, and development partners. Translate stakeholder feedback into spatial strategies, floor plans, and conceptual frameworks. Collaborate across Playbook’s cross-functional teams to align design with operational and strategic goals.
Design Development: Translate operational goals into lookbooks, test fits, and peer review of other consultants. Coordinate with AORs, GCs, and vendors to translate design intent into reality. Attend site tours, milestone reviews, and launches to ensure design quality meets operational needs.
Internal Collaboration: Work closely with the VP of Design & Development to refine internal tools, templates, and playbooks standards. Contribute to presentation decks and design deliverables across our portfolio. Help shape and evolve our proprietary space-type strategies for our partners.

Baseline Expectations:

5–6 years of experience in architecture or interior design, ideally in hospitality, workplace, or mixed-use projects
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Architecture or Interior Design
Highly proficient in Adobe Creative Suite, AutoCAD, SketchUp (Revit is a bonus)
Strong communicator, especially with architects, consultants, and internal teams
Comfortable with a fast-paced, ever-evolving workload- and excited by scale

Core Competencies:

Execution-Oriented: You know what it takes to get a project built, and you’re ready and excited to own that process.
Architect-Facing: You’re fluent in construction sets, code constraints, and technical details.
Upwardly Mobile: You’re not looking for a plateau or steady-state, you want a mentor, a platform, and room to grow.
Strategic Communicator: You bring clarity and confidence to every deck, diagram, or room layout.
Resourceful & Reliable: You ask good questions, solve problems, and follow through every time.
Brand-Driven: You understand the power of space to reinforce brand, culture, and experience.

Our Core Values:

Playbook's culture is based on a shared respect for our lived values HERE. Fit with our values is a critical component of our hiring process, and you and all of our colleagues are expected to live our core values in interactions with team members, customers, and stakeholders. An assessment of how you have exhibited our values is also an important part of your performance review process.

Our Commitment To You:

Playbook is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We know the more inclusive we are, the greater our impact will be!

A Quick Note About Salaries:

We list salaries based on market benchmarks, project complexity, and team structure. This role has been scoped specifically for our high-growth Design & Development team, and we’re happy to discuss compensation openly during the process.