Principal UX Design Lead

We’re partnering with a high-growth, global financial technology company that helps businesses manage payments, spend, and complex financial workflows across several lines of business, to find a Principal UX Design Lead for its enterprise product design team.

This is a newly created role sitting above a small, growing design team, and it’s intentionally built to be both a leader and a hands-on contributor. You’ll set UX vision and standards for a data-rich, multi-product enterprise platform, coach and grow two designers on staff, and stay directly involved in shipping design work yourself.

The organization is in the middle of significant transformation: rapid growth through acquisition, an evolving delivery methodology, and a strong, forward-leaning investment in AI across the product and engineering org. This role plays a central part in connecting the design process, from early concept through clickable prototype, directly into that AI-accelerated delivery pipeline.

What You’ll Do

• Own UX strategy and design standards across a complex, data-dense enterprise platform spanning multiple product lines.
• Coach and mentor a team of two designers (one senior, one advancing toward a senior level), with room for the team to grow further.
• Stay hands-on: personally design and prototype for high-priority initiatives alongside your team - this is not a pure management role.
• Champion a shift from static, screen-by-screen handoffs to fast, clickable prototyping - modeled on a design-sprint style approach - so engineering receives a validated, interactive prototype instead of a written spec.
• Own and evolve the company’s design system and component library, partnering closely with engineering (Figma to React) to keep it consistent and scalable.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to front-load design and user validation before development starts, reducing rework and last-minute, “just-in-time” design requests.
• Help define how the design system and prototyping process feed directly into AI-assisted code generation as the organization matures its AI-driven delivery model.
• Present design direction, tradeoffs, and rationale directly to senior and executive stakeholders.
• Bring a point of view on in-app guidance and product analytics tooling (e.g., Pendo or similar) to inform design and onboarding decisions.

• 7-10+ years of UX/product design experience, including senior-level work on complex, data-rich B2B or enterprise products.
• A strong portfolio you can walk through in detail - this is the primary way design craft will be evaluated.
• 2-3+ years of experience directly leading, coaching, or managing designers.
• Proven ability to work confidently with, and present design rationale to, executive stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience with Figma in a team environment where engineering builds in React.
• Experience building or significantly maturing a design system and component library.
• Demonstrated experience running fast, clickable prototyping (rather than static comps) to align product, design, and engineering before development starts.
• Comfort operating in a fast-changing, ambiguous environment - priorities, org structure, and process here shift often.
• Strong interest in how AI is changing design and product delivery, and how design work can feed directly into AI-assisted development., * Experience with Pendo, or a comparable product analytics/in-app guidance tool (e.g., WalkMe, Mixpanel).
• Background in fintech, payments, or another complex, highly regulated B2B software environment.
• Experience designing data-heavy, grid-based enterprise interfaces.
• Experience working on a fully remote, distributed product and design team.

This is a fast-paced, high-change environment - the team is actively working to increase its shipping cadence and is comfortable with ongoing shifts in priorities, structure, and process. Culturally, the team is professional but informal: casual day-to-day interaction, with real structure and accountability.

Why This Role

• Join a large, global company with multiple lines of business - strong performance here can open doors to growth well beyond this team.
• Set the UX direction for a major enterprise platform used to manage complex, high-volume financial workflows.
• Get in early on a design org that’s actively being built out and invested in - this role has real influence over its future shape and standards.
• Work at a company that is genuinely AI-forward, with design positioned as a key part of how AI accelerates delivery.