Head of Product Design

Airwallex-; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex is hiring a Head of Product Design to lead our global team of product designers and leaders across Australia, the UK, the US, and Singapore. The role carries organizational authority, including a seat on the Global Leadership Team and ownership of the design budget.

You will scale the design organization’s practice, quality standards, systems, and culture, while hiring and developing a world-class design team and expanding our SF design studio.

Qualifications

• Must demonstrate exceptional product and UX judgment from strategy to micro-interactions.
• Proven track record of attracting and calibrating top designers and design leaders.
• Experience building products that scale in fintech or similarly complex domains.
• Experience managing senior design leaders across regions/time zones and people systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead a global team (40+) across Spend Management, Business Accounts, Payments, Billing, Platform, Growth, and Design Systems.
• Scale the design org's practices, standards, systems, and culture globally.
• Hire, develop, and retain top designers and expand SF-based studio.
• Collaborate with the CPO to share product experience strategy.
• Own end-to-end design budget: contractors, tooling, learning, research, travel, team building.
• Uphold and evolve the design org operating principles.

Skills

Taste-driven product UX

Global leadership

Comfort with fintech complexity

Leadership at scale

Executive-level planning

Job description

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 250,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale.

Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,300 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 27 offices around the globe. Valued at US$11 billion and backed by world‑leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us.

Attributes We Value

We hire successful builders with founder‑like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role‑related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor.

You’re humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end‑to‑end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next.

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.

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.