Global Head of Product Design & Design Systems

Airwallex; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex in San Francisco seeks a Head of Product Design to lead a global team of designers across Australia, the UK, the US and Singapore. You will shape design strategy, scale systems, and elevate the practice with executive-level influence.

You will own the design budget, hire and develop leaders, and partner with product management and engineering to deliver bold, scalable user experiences across domains and geographies.

Qualifications

• Strong product design sensibilities from strategy to pixels.
• Ability to attract, hire and calibrate top designers and design leaders.
• Experience in fintech or similarly complex product domains.

Responsibilities

• Lead a global team (40+) across all product verticals and scale our design org.
• Continue to hire, develop, and retain a world-class design team and expand SF design studio.
• Own the design budget end to end: contractors, tooling, learning, research, travel, and team building.
• Work with the CPO to share our product experience strategy.
• Maintain three operating principles and evolve them as the team grows.

Skills

Product design

UX judgment

Hiring leaders

Fintech experience

Leadership at scale

Job description

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own.

We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full.

About the role

Airwallex is looking for a Head of Product Design to lead our global team of product designers and leaders across Australia, the UK, the US, and Singapore.

We are scaling quickly as a design organization, one with a track record of building teams and sophisticated products across domains, functions, and geographies. The right candidate will have exceptional product taste and attention to detail, and the ability to scale it across the org.

This role carries real organizational authority: a seat on the Global Leadership Team, ownership of the product design budget, and a design org that is a peer to product management and engineering.

What you’ll do

• Lead a global team (40+) across all product verticals: Spend Management, Business Accounts, Payments, Billing, Platform, Growth, and Design Systems.
• Continue to scale our product design organization’s practice, quality standards, systems, and culture globally.
• Continue to hire, develop, and retain a world-class design team, and expand our SF-based design studio.
• Work closely with the CPO to share our product experience strategy.
• Own the design budget end to end: contractors, tooling, learning, research, travel, and team building.
• Steward the design organization’s three operating principles (below) and evolve them as the team grows.

What we’re looking for

• Taste, all the way down. Exceptional product and UX judgment from strategy to the finest grain of the work: interaction patterns, information architecture, layout, UX copy. You know how software should look, work, and feel to be powerful and scalable, and you can articulate why in crit and move a team there. A generalist UX background with strong product sensibilities.
• A world-class hirer. You have a track record of personally attracting, closing, and calibrating exceptional designers and design leaders.
• Comfort with complexity. You’ve worked in fintech or in a comparably complex product domain, and know how to build products that handle that complexity gracefully.
• Leadership at scale. You’ve managed senior design leaders across regions and timezones, and run the people systems that make that work: calibration, promotion, and org design.
• Executive fluency. Comfortable operating in company-level planning cycles: OKRs, headcount plans, budgets, and leadership-team collaboration.

How our design org works

Three principles guide our product design org. The right candidate will help carry them forward:

• Designers do design with other designers: We trust the user-centered design process, and create space for designer-on-designer collaboration across domains. This is in addition to the natural collaboration between a designer and their product manager.
• Product design is a peer to product management: Our designers have the authority and responsibility for their work, timelines, and outcomes. Our design leaders support their designers in this, and on stakeholder management with product management and engineering.
• We’re always improving our skills: Design is a craft of behavioural and technical skills, and possessing them is what makes us designers. We run bi-weekly lunch-and-learns, fund a team learning budget, and staff a Design Practice Lead to develop key skills on our teams.

Applicant Safety Policy: Fraud and Third-Party Recruiters

To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page.

Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary.

Equal opportunity

Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.