# Head of Design and Research

**Company:** [Upside](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/upside)
**Location:** Washington, DC
**Role:** Product Design
**Salary:** $249k – $289k/yr
**Skills:** Product Design, User Research, Design Systems, Consumer Product Design, Fintech, Marketplaces, Data Analysis, AI Tools, Team Leadership, Ux Strategy
**Posted:** 2026-06-17

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

## Job Description

## 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.

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