Head of Product Design

Liberis; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Liberis is seeking a senior design leader to set the design direction, grow a six-person team, and deliver thoughtful, consistent experiences across products and services. You will connect customer needs and commercial goals, shaping agentic experiences and building with AI tools.

This role is a player-coach position, blending hands-on design in Figma with team leadership. You will report to the CPO, work across London and Stockholm, and help drive measurable business impact through design

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading and developing a product design team.
• Portfolio of shipped digital products showing design judgment and outcomes.
• Recent track record as a player-coach, leading a team while doing hands-on design.

Responsibilities

• Set design direction and align with product strategy across teams.
• Lead and grow the design team; mentor, hire, and drive AI-enabled design practices.
• Create a unified design experience across direct and partner channels; own design system.

Skills

Team leadership

Product design

AI prototyping

User research

Design systems

Stakeholder management

Figma

Tools

Figma

Claude Code

Job description

We have provided over $3bn of funding to small businesses so far

We have been named in CNBC & Statista Top 150 UK Fintechs for 2025

We're a global team, with a dynamic presence in 6 key locations around the world

We're a thriving community of over 290 innovative minds

Our team brings experience from over 740 previous companies, from startups to global giants

We have just been named as one of FinTech’s Finest 50 by Welcome to the Jungle

We’re proud to be an accredited Real Living Wage employer, ensuring everyone is paid fairly for the great work they do!

About Us

Liberis and Qred have merged to build the financial partner small businesses rely on.

We serve businesses directly and inside the software they already use, through more than 30 partners including Deliveroo, Vagaro and eBay. It all runs on one platform backed by our EU banking licence.

Together, we serve hundreds of thousands of small businesses across 18 countries.

We’re early in bringing the two businesses together, and there’s real change ahead as we build one team and one experience. We’re moving fast, and the next two years will shape the business for the decade. If you want to help shape a company at this stage, this role is for you.

The team

Our Product Design team, based in London and Stockholm, works alongside Product, Engineering and colleagues across the business to shape the experiences that connect merchants, partners and our internal teams.

Our work spans customer journeys, partner experiences and the operational tools that support them. We bring research, service design and strong product craft together to make complex financial processes clear, useful and easy to navigate.

The role:

Reporting to the CPO, you’ll set a clear design direction, lead and develop the design team of six and ensure we deliver thoughtful, consistent experiences across our products and services.

You’ll connect the needs of customers, partners and operational teams with our commercial goals, helping us decide which problems to solve and how to solve them well

Our product is growing beyond a single lending journey into something owners rely on more often. In parallel, we’ll start experimenting with agentic experiences in 2027: products that act on the owner’s behalf, within rules they set. This is new design territory, and you’ll help shape it from the first experiment. You’ll lead how it feels: clear, calm and in the owner’s control.

This is a player-coach role. You’ll lead the team and still design hands-on yourself, taking on some of our most important journeys. Expect to spend real time in Figma and in prototypes, not only in reviews. You’ll coach designers, challenge decisions and help teams move from discovery through to delivery. You’ll know when to guide, when to give people space and when to take the work on yourself.

The way design gets done is changing fast, and we want someone who leans in. You’ll use AI and agentic tools to explore more ideas, build working prototypes and learn from users in days, not weeks.

Success means a team that grows in capability and confidence, experiences that improve outcomes for users, and design decisions that translate into shipped products and measurable business impact.

What you’ll get to do:

• Set the design direction. Shape a design vision that supports our product strategy. Work with the CPO and leaders across Product, Engineering, Commercial, Risk and Operations to bring user needs and evidence into decisions early.
• Lead and grow the team. Coach and develop designers, and shape the team’s structure and hiring as we grow. Lead the shift to designing with AI and agentic tools, so the whole team learns and ships faster.
• Build one experience across direct and partner channels. Run the team as one across London and Stockholm. Build one design system and set of journey patterns for our own app and our partner-branded experiences, and bring the group brand into the product with Marketing.
• Design the agentic experiences of tomorrow. Shape how our agent works for owners: what it watches, when it acts and when it asks first. Design the explanations and controls that earn trust, and make sure our products work for partner platforms and AI assistants as well as people.
• Raise design quality, hands-on. Take on key journeys yourself. Set high standards for interaction, visual design, content and accessibility, and work closely with engineers so quality holds in what we ship.
• Lead user research and measure impact. Lead our user research team, which today is one researcher, and build a regular research rhythm. Own the measures that show design is working, such as journey completion, design system reuse and time from problem to tested design.

The interview process:

• Screening call with Chess (Internal Recruiter) (30 mins)
• Video interview with our CPO (1 hour)
• Video interview with our Product Director (1 hour)
• Case Study interview with the Product Design team (90 mins)

What we think you'll need:

• Proven experience leading and developing a product design team, with examples of coaching designers, managing performance and improving team effectiveness.
• A portfolio of shipped digital products or services that demonstrates strong design judgement, your personal contribution and the outcomes achieved.
• A recent track record as a player coach: leading a team while still doing hands-on design yourself, and enjoying both.
• Experience setting design direction across multiple product areas, turning business strategy and ambiguity into clear, practical priorities.
• Strong product design craft, with the ability to assess interaction patterns, visual hierarchy, accessibility and end-to-end journeys, and give specific, useful feedback.
• Experience leading user research and managing researchers, and using research with data to influence decisions. You know when deeper discovery is needed and when a team has enough evidence to move forward.
• Experience developing or scaling design systems, with an understanding of component-based design and modern design and AI prototyping tools, such as Figma and Claude Code.
• Hands-on experience designing with AI and agentic tools day to day, for example to build working prototypes, speed up research or build your own tools, and a view on how they change the way design teams work.
• The ability to influence senior stakeholders and work closely with Product and Engineering leaders, explaining trade-offs clearly and balancing user needs, commercial goals and technical constraints.

Our hybrid approach

Working together in person helps us move faster, collaborate better and build a great Liberis culture. Our hybrid working approach currently includes at least three days a week in the office, increasing to at least four days following our move to a new office, anticipated in Q1 2027.