Principal Product Designer - Consumer

About the role

As a Principal Product Designer at Flex, you’ll solve problems for consumers across the country who are underserved by existing financial products. We’re handling people’s most significant recurring expense, which means the stakes of getting the experience right are real: a confusing screen or a poorly handled edge case can cost someone a late fee, a credit mark, or a difficult conversation with their leasing office.

We’re looking for a designer to lead a full area of our business. You’ll shape and drive the vision for your vertical, and you’ll be accountable for how it connects to everything around itThe experience only holds together if someone is responsible for the whole of it, not just their team’s slice. That means setting direction, aligning several teams around one coherent picture, and raising the quality bar across all of them.

This is an individual contributor role with the influence of a leader. Your leverage comes from the artifacts you make, the standards you set, and the designers you make better, not from a reporting line. You’ll still be deep in the work leading design exploration on the most critical projects, and building the prototypes that show where a body of work is headed and what it will unlock.

This is a highly measured, highly cross-functional environment, with a big opportunity for designers to bridge true customer needs with creative solutions. You’ll work alongside product managers, engineers, data analysts, risk, and compliance partners, and most of what you design will run as an experiment before it becomes the default. The designers who do their best work here are highly creative with solutioning, curious about the numbers, comfortable with constraints, and willing to change their minds when the evidence says to. All of your design skills will be put to use, from design thinking to interaction design and visual design.

What you’ll do

• Lead design for a full area of the business by shaping and driving the vision for your vertical, and owning the strategy and end-to-end execution that delivers it
• Connect and align multiple teams through complex design challenges, weaving separate visions into one cohesive ecosystem
• Lead design exploration and solutions on the most critical projects across your area, staying close enough to the work to set the standard by doing it
• Consistently set a high bar for quality across features, concepts, and innovative solutions. Hold the bar through the standards you define, the critiques you lead, and the feedback you give designers on any team your area touches
• Design for people under real financial pressure by bringing clarity, honesty, and dignity to flows where money and consequences are involved, including the error, pending, and recovery states that are easy to leave for last
• Build the prototypes and artifacts that paint a picture of where your body of work is headed, and use them to align partners and leadership on the opportunities worth going after
• Play a pivotal role in strategic initiatives by supporting your team and company strategy with a wide range of inputs: qualitative research, data, industry trends, and your own design expertise
• Partner with PM, analytics, risk, and engineering to structure experiments. Define hypotheses to test, what a guardrail should protect, and what a result would actually prove
• Establish design-thinking methods and toolkits that other teams can pick up and use, so a customer-centered approach doesn’t depend on you being in the room
• Evolve our Design System, Ultraviolet, including its foundational patterns and our visual language so every team inherits good defaults instead of reinventing them
• Establish and evolve the standards for how we use AI across the product development lifecycle, from research and exploration to prototyping, and work with frontend engineering to improve design-to-code quality

Key qualifications

• 10+ years designing and shipping consumer products, including time leading a product area or vertical rather than a single team
• A track record aligning several teams around a shared experience, and the judgment to know when to set a standard versus when to let a team solve it their own way
• Fluency with experimentation and quantitative reasoning. You’re comfortable designing for A/B tests, reading funnel and cohort data, and changing your mind when the result disagrees with you
• Strength in the unglamorous states (errors, edge cases, pending, and recovery) where a product either earns trust or loses it
• Comfort treating technical and regulatory constraints as design material rather than obstacles, without needing them translated for you
• Evidence of raising the quality bar for people around you: mentorship, critique, standards, or systems that outlasted your involvement
• Track record of designing simple, intuitive products that are powered by complex systems and edge cases
• Comfort documenting and explaining your design process and rationale behind decisions, including leveraging best practices, research, and data
• Demonstrated aptitude for getting things done to make your team successful
• Strong native mobile app design experience (iOS and Android)
• Figma expert, and experience using AI tools to sketch and prototype
• Comfort with ambiguous problems and the motivation to be a self-starter
• Passion for improving every day people’s financial well being
• A portfolio of work detailing your contributions to shipped solutions

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech or another regulated environment, designing disclosures or money movement flows alongside legal and compliance partners
• Experience in an experimentation-heavy product organization where most changes ship behind a flag
• Experience establishing new ways of working, through design operations, rituals, toolkits, or AI-assisted workflows, that a team adopted and kept

This role is based out of one of our hubs in New York City, Salt Lake City, or San Francisco. We’re also open to candidates interested in starting on a contract-to-hire basis. Please note that those who transition to a full-time role will likely need to relocate to one of these hub locations.

Tier 1 (NYC/Bay Area) 240000 - 300000 USD
Tier 3 (Salt Lake City) 204000 - 255000 USD