Head of Design (Hands-On), Digital Assets

About Nu

Nu serves more than 140 million customers, guided by a mission to fight complexity and empower people. The company has been leading an industry transformation through innovative products and human-centered services.

Proprietary technology and data at scale power Nu’s digital platform, built to promote financial access, advancement, and transparency. Its business model thrives on customer love and lower costs, feeding a flywheel of growth and profitability.

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Head of Design (Hands-On), Digital Assets

We are building open money and open financial services — not "crypto."

The Digital Assets team at Nu is reimagining how a financial services platform can use blockchain technology to solve real problems for real people — without ever making customers think about the blockchain at all. We have deliberately renamed ourselves from Crypto to Digital Assets, and we have effectively banned the word "crypto" internally. We do not do crypto for crypto's sake. We do blockchain banking.

The reference point is Apple Pay. It runs on cryptography, public and private keys, and secure tokenization inside a secure enclave. Apple never says any of that. It says "on device," and "it just works." That is the standard for everything we ship.

The Role

We are looking for a hands-on design leader to join the Digital Assets team in Palo Alto. You will be the lead design voice for a genuinely new category: making digital assets — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and stablecoins — as simple, accessible, and trusted as a debit card swipe.

This role sits at the intersection of consumer product design, financial innovation, and zero-to-one invention. Much of what you will design has never existed in consumer form before. You will not be asked to study what the incumbents did; the explicit instruction is to carve a new path.

What You Will Design

• The buy, hold, and sell experience for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Digital Dollars, etc. — designed to feel intuitive, familiar, and clear from the first interaction.

• Earning, also known as staking: an experience that lets customers put eligible digital assets to work and earn rewards with clarity, control, and trust — without exposing the protocol mechanics underneath.

• Onchain transfers and payments: sending, receiving, and using digital assets in ways that feel as simple and dependable as moving money today, while the underlying blockchain complexity stays out of the customer’s way.

• The invisible infrastructure layer that powers core functionality across the entire company, including the US build.

• Both the customer experience and the platform that other teams will draw on for future launches.

• New ways for people to own, move, use, and grow value across financial products and borders — shaping a flexible foundation for what open money can become without being constrained by today’s conventions.

What We Are Looking For

• Consumer instincts over crypto fluency. Deep domain experience in crypto is not the point here — and can even work against you. If your instinct is to explain custody models or gas fees to a customer, this is not the seat.

• Mobile expertise is a must-have. There is no desktop app in Brazil; effectively no web. Strong recent mobile work is non-negotiable, and a primarily B2B or enterprise background is a hard fit.

• Zero-to-one experience. You have designed products that did not exist before, where there were no references to copy, and you thrived in the ambiguity.

• A product marketing mindset. You care about the words, the positioning, and how it feels — not just the design elements. Our touchstone is "a thousand songs in your pocket," decided before the product was designed.

• The ability to hide complexity. You have made something complicated feel obvious and delightful. Products that resonate with us: Cash App, Apple, the Tesla app, Duolingo, Wise, Revolut.

• Fintech experience is a plus, never a requirement. We will teach you the compliance, legal, and regulatory ropes. What we cannot teach is the instinct to dream a magical experience first.

• A short line to the business. The design team reports directly to the GM of the business unit. For a senior designer, that means unusual room to shape strategy rather than receive it.

How We Work

• Dream first. The hiring manager's framing is: "Dream the magical experience first. We'll tell you afterwards what's not allowed."

• No desktop-first. Everything is mobile-first, consumer-first.

• No copy-and-paste. No copying from Coinbase or Robinhood. We are deliberately different.

• The US is part of the trajectory. You will be shaping work that serves the next phase of global growth.

The Team

You will report directly to Michael Rihani, GM of the Digital Assets business unit. Michael is a product leader with close to twenty years of experience, including four years at Apple on Apple Pay, leading Bitcoin and consumer financial services at Cash App and Coinbase, and directing Supercharging UX and Bitcoin payments at Tesla. He believes the biggest thing the industry is missing is storytellers and design people who can make the technology disappear.

Interview Process

1. Portfolio review with Ethan Eismann (CDO, Nu) — asynchronous

2. Live portfolio presentation with 2-3 design leaders and/or senior designers (~1 hour)

3. Hiring manager interview with Michael Rihani

4. Possible additional interviews. This interview process is subject to change, and may evolve with the hiring process. We appreciate your flexibility.

Our recruitment process may involve the use of artificial intelligence–enabled tools, such as automated interview transcription and analysis, to support the evaluation process. Artificial intelligence is not used to make final hiring decisions; all decisions are made by human reviewers.

To maintain a consistent and fair process for every candidate, Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback. See how our policy works here