Lead, Design Architect - Customer Experience

Unlock the Power of YouAt 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-dayThe 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 AuthorityServe as the design authority and experience owner for customer‑facing digital experiencesLead the design and experience strategy across key platforms (Website, Mobile App, Search, Application, Portal, etc.) and co‑own with the Sr. Director of DXDRefine experience standards, interaction patterns, and design principles for customer workflowsEmbed experience design thinking into CoE workflows, prioritization, and decision‑makingCustomer/XO/MXG Engagement & Insight GenerationBuild strong relationships with the customer experts (Customer Experience, Experience Owners, Product/Technology) to identify friction points and translate them into prioritized design and tooling opportunitiesRepresent the customer perspective in cross‑functional planning, roadmap reviews, and strategy sessionsDocument and share insights to build lasting institutional knowledgeAnalytics, Feedback Loops & Adoption TrackingTrack feature adoption and assess alignment with intended experience outcomesConduct ongoing system usability assessments with associatesEstablish and maintain feedback mechanisms between customers and DXD/product/technology teamsReport on experience performance, surfacing gaps, wins, and opportunitiesWork with XOs to identify and elevate opportunities to close visibility gaps in customer experience dataEstablish a forward‑looking view of customer experience prioritiesAI‑Assisted Design, Vibe Coding & Rapid PrototypingLeverage vibe coding and AI‑assisted design to rapidly translate insights into testable conceptsPrototype alternative workflows, tool interactions, and experience improvements across customer platformsEvaluate and adopt emerging AI design tooling that accelerates design and innovationExperimentation & Design‑Led TestingPartner closely with the Director of Experimentation to co‑develop insight‑driven hypothesesLead design of experience experiments for customer‑facing tools, from concept through analysisDesign with testability in mind—structuring variants, workflows, and interactions to drive measurable outcomesEmbrace A/B testing and experimentation as standard practice in validating customer experience changesSupport the XO experimentation model, with XOs owning experiment backlogs and DXD serving as the methodology and execution expertEarly Discovery & UX Research PartnershipPartner with UX Research early in discovery to co‑design research approaches, translate insights into real‑time design direction, and validate ideas before prototyping or experimentationChampion continuous discovery as an ongoing…