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UpsideUpsideWashington, DC

Head of Design and Research

Lead design and research for a consumer fintech app, owning quality and polish while scaling a small embedded team through hypergrowth to 10M MAU.

249k – 289k
HybridProduct Design

About the role

What you'll do

  • Own the quality, consistency, and polish bar across the consumer and payments experience.
  • Lead a small, tightly knit team of designers and researchers embedded in delivery pods; systematically grow their craft and how the team operates.
  • Architect cohesive design systems and frameworks across fragmented journeys and surfaces — balancing design integrity against iteration speed.
  • Partner with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to pull design into discovery and drive measurable outcomes across onboarding, discovery, redemption, and retention.
  • Deepen the research practice and its integration into decision-making.
  • Apply an AI-native approach to how design and research scale.

What you'll need

  • Deep consumer product design experience where trust, credibility, and onboarding psychology drive conversion and retention — ideally fintech, marketplaces, or transaction-driven products.
  • Track record designing habit-forming systems (frequency, retention, cross-category adoption) at consumer scale.
  • Has personally helped scale a consumer app through hypergrowth (~3M → 10M+ MAU).
  • Strong systems-level product thinking; sound judgment on where consistency matters vs. where to move fast.
  • Comfort in highly analytical environments; uses data to drive and prove UX impact.
  • Has led design/research teams of ~5–10 and raised individual craft.
  • AI-centric approach to design and research.
  • Bias to action; effective in ambiguity without requiring a perfect environment.

Skills

Product DesignUser ResearchDesign SystemsConsumer Product DesignFintechMarketplacesData AnalysisAI ToolsTeam LeadershipUx Strategy

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