Vice President, Design

About CookUnity:

Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.

Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.

VP Design

About CookUnity

CookUnity connects people with exceptional food made by chefs. Founded in 2018, we are building a chef-powered food marketplace with a mission to empower chefs to nourish the world.

Our ambition is to build the best product in our market and a company that matters for generations. Food gives us an extraordinary design opportunity: chefs with distinct stories, meals worth craving, photography, personalization, packaging and a recurring place in people's lives. This hire will bring those pieces together as we shape CookUnity's next stage.

About the role

We are looking for a VP of Design with exceptional taste, deep product design expertise and the ambition to make everyday eating dramatically better.

How do you make food irresistible through a screen? Help people discover meals they will love without making choosing feel like work? Build a connection with the chef behind their food? Make opening the box live up to the promise of the app? These are the challenges you will help us solve.

This full-time executive role reports to Head of Product, and leads Product Design, Brand Design, and Product Insights and Research Ops. You will build on the existing Product Design and Research teams, lead through their functional leaders, and develop Brand Design leadership. Product design depth is essential.

You will shape what we build and why alongside Product, Engineering and Marketing, identify unmet needs and bring forward experiences beyond today's roadmap. You will set the vision and stay close enough to the work to carry its quality through to what customers actually receive.

What you will do

Shape an exceptional product experience

• Make discovery, personalization and recurring ordering easier, more compelling and more useful, while helping customers explore the breadth of our chefs and food.
• Turn ambitious ideas into working prototypes that help teams understand the opportunity, challenge assumptions and choose what matters.
• Set a demanding bar for interaction, visual design, content, accessibility and usability. Give precise feedback, sweat the details and challenge work that is not good enough.
• Partner with Product and Engineering from early exploration through implementation and launch. Build design systems that make excellent execution repeatable.

Connect the brand promise to the experience

• Lead Brand Design and creative direction across digital and physical touchpoints, making our chefs, their food and their individuality come alive.
• Partner with Marketing on campaigns, storytelling, photography and packaging. Establish a coherent design language across product, communications and the experience of receiving a meal.

Make customer understanding change decisions

• Lead Product Insights and Research Ops, with direct customer contact and rigorous research shaping priorities rather than simply validating solutions.
• Combine qualitative insight, behavioral data and experimentation to understand unmet needs, evaluate trade-offs and improve experiences after launch.
• Share accountability with Product, Engineering and Marketing for conversion, engagement, retention, customer satisfaction and lasting business value.

Build an exceptional team

• Recruit outstanding designers and researchers, develop managers and future leaders, and give teams clear direction and room to do their best work.
• Build a culture of honest critique, constructive disagreement and responsibility for the whole customer experience.
• Use AI to expand the team's capabilities in research synthesis, exploration, working prototypes and implementation, with clear standards for quality and responsible use.
• Help shape intuitive AI-powered customer experiences that earn trust and deliver real value.

What success looks like

In your first year, customers and teams should see:

• A clear experience vision with meaningful improvements shipped.
• Easier, more personal meal discovery and recurring ordering.
• A distinctive, coherent experience across our app, website, communications and physical touchpoints.
• A stronger team with capable leaders and consistently better work.
• Customer research that materially changes priorities and product decisions.

You will define and evaluate the customer and business outcomes of this work with your cross-functional partners.

What you bring

• Exceptional product design judgment, with deep interaction and visual design expertise and a record of materially improving a consumer product.
• Evidence of recruiting outstanding people, managing managers and developing leaders who deliver high-quality work.
• Strong brand judgment and the ability to lead specialists across product, research and creative disciplines.
• Strategic influence with executive peers, clear decisions under competing priorities and the willingness to challenge the brief.
• Customer curiosity, commercial understanding and practical experience using AI to improve your team's capabilities.

Your portfolio should distinguish what you personally shaped, what your team delivered, what shipped and what changed for customers and the business.

Experience in marketplaces, subscriptions, food, wellness or businesses connecting digital and physical experiences is particularly relevant.

How we work

We value taste, agency and coherence. We expect leaders to take initiative, challenge work that falls short and help others reach a better answer. Our Leadership Principles describe how we work, collaborate and grow.

Learn More About CookUnity We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we're looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale. We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we'd love to connect. 

 

 

Compensation

All final pay rates will be determined by candidates experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data.Pay Range for this position$250,000—$300,000 USD

If you’re interested in this role, please submit your application, and if we think you might be a fit, we'll get in touch with you. Thank you for your time!

 

CookUnity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or physical or mental disability.

A quick note for all candidates
We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams across the industry, and we want to make sure you (and your data) stay safe while applying to CookUnity. We also want you to know that we take this seriously — sometimes, as part of our process, we may ask for a brief “proof of humanity” to confirm that we’re connecting with a real person, not an impersonator. Here are a few tips to help you protect yourself and know what to expect from us:

• Apply only through our official channels. All open roles are listed on our official careers page: careers.cookunity.com
• Our recruiters are real people — and easy to verify. You can always find them on LinkedIn with verified profiles. If you’re unsure, feel free to reach out to us on our official LinkedIn Company Page.
• We only communicate through official CookUnity channels. That means emails ending in @cookunity.com and interviews held through official company platforms (Google Meet or Zoom) — never WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS.
• We’ll never ask for payment or personal financial details. If anyone does, please don’t share any information and let us know right away.

If something ever feels off or you’re unsure about a message, we’d much rather you double-check with us. You can always contact us directly through any of our social media channels. We appreciate your interest in joining CookUnity — and we care about keeping your experience (and safety) as genuine as possible.