Principal Art Director - Product

Our mission at Oura is to empower every person to own their inner potential. Our award-winning products help our global community gain a deeper knowledge of their readiness, activity, and sleep quality by using their Oura Ring and its connected app. We've helped millions of people understand and improve their health by providing daily insights and practical steps to inspire healthy lifestyles.

Empowering the world starts with living our values and empowering our team. As a quickly growing company focused on helping people live healthier and happier lives, we ensure that our team members have what they need to do their best work — both in and out of the office. 

We're looking for a Principal Art Director, Product to own and evolve Oura's visual language across illustration, photography direction, and iconography in the Oura App — and to help shape the next chapter of the app experience.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who leads through their work: setting a clear bar, defining principles, and guiding craft from concept through polish. It's a craft-and-systems-driven position for someone who can build coherence over time — directing a trusted network of human creators (illustrators, photographers, and partners) with a decisive editorial eye, while acting as a connective force between product design, brand, marketing, and the broader organization.

At the principal level, you don't just deliver great visual work — you help define what great looks like at Oura. You're a practitioner and a multiplier. You do the work, and in doing so, you show others how to do it better. You operate at the intersection of product design, brand, marketing, and e-commerce, bringing editorial sophistication while ensuring the work stays consistent, scalable, and distinctly "Oura."

This is a 6-month fixed-term role based hybrid (3 days per week) in our San Francisco office. 

What you will do:

Own and evolve Oura's product visual language for illustration, photography, and iconography; defining principles, guardrails, and a quality bar that scales across the app.

Set photography direction and curation standards for product surfaces: subject matter, composition, lighting, tone, and sourcing, ensuring imagery feels human, contemporary, and trustworthy.

Build and steward illustration systems (style rules, usage guidance, levels of abstraction, emotional tone, and governance) that stay cohesive as products and narratives evolve.

Partner closely with Product Design and Design Systems to ensure icons and illustrative assets support clarity, accessibility, and conceptual correctness in UI.

Be the voice of quality. You have a strong, well-developed point of view on what makes great visual work. You articulate it clearly, defend it when necessary, and bring others along. In critiques, you give feedback that is both rigorous and actionable, pointing toward better solutions, not just away from bad ones.

Think in systems. You see how individual screens, moments, and assets connect across the product, and you help ensure coherence at scale across states, flows, and platforms without letting system thinking crowd out the soul of the experience.

Hold a curatorial eye across the whole product. You bring discernment to how imagery, motion, and storytelling show up in the app. You know when something is "Oura" and when it isn't, and you help the team develop that same sensibility.

Develop clear creative briefs, references, and review rituals that help internal teams and external partners deliver consistent work with minimal iteration.

Operate with a freelance-first mindset: source, onboard, direct, and manage external talent; maintain organized handoffs; and keep quality high.

Knit together the work. You build relationships proactively across design disciplines, product, engineering, brand, and marketing, surfacing connections between workstreams that others miss so the whole adds up to something elevated, not just a sum of its parts.

Elevate the team through showing, not just telling. You lead by example your work sets the standard, your process is visible and legible to others, and you invest in the people around you through thoughtful critique and informal mentorship.

Advocate for human-made craft and responsible sourcing across illustration and photography, balancing speed with enduring quality.

Explore the frontier. You actively explore how AI and agentic tools can accelerate and enrich the creative process: prototyping new workflows, testing emerging tools, and helping the team work in ways that weren't possible before.

Requirements

We would love to have you on our team if you have: 

• 15+ years of design experience, with at least 10 years operating as a high-influence individual contributor at a staff or principal level; setting direction and raising quality without relying on formal authority.
• A portfolio that demonstrates exceptional UI craft alongside systems thinking: cohesive experiences at scale, not just individual screens for world class companies.
• The ability to hold and defend a strong aesthetic point of view while remaining genuinely open to input and collaboration.
• Deep fluency with mobile design: interaction patterns, platform conventions, motion, and the nuanced decisions that make an app feel alive or flat.
• Strong curatorial instincts across imagery, motion, and visual storytelling, with an understanding of how these elements shape trust, emotion, and brand in a health and fitness context.
• Excellent communication skills: you can make the invisible visible, explaining why a decision is right, what's missing in a design, or where a system is breaking down.
• A pattern of proactive cross-functional collaboration: you build relationships and seek out connections rather than waiting for them to come to you.
• Familiarity with how AI and agentic tools are changing design practice, with curiosity and energy to explore what's next.

We love

• Experience working on health, wellness, or other trust-sensitive products where emotional tone and credibility must be carefully calibrated.
• A history of improving the design culture of teams around you—not through formal management, but through example, generosity, and craft.
• Experience working with contractors: writing RFPs, vetting, hiring, and directing. 
• Experience navigating the intersection of product design and brand expression.
• A point of view on motion, microinteraction, and the role of delight in utility-forward products.
• Curiosity about the world and a passion for great design wherever you find it.