Lead Product Designer

Zed; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Zed is seeking a senior product designer to help define the next phase of our product, from core credit experiences to an AI private banker that understands context and guides financial decisions. This senior IC role involves shaping product strategy, interaction design, and craft, and you will lead through the work with cross-functional partners.

You will partner with engineers from idea through production, helping solve problems, raising the quality bar, and building scalable design

Qualifications

• 7+ years designing consumer software and shipping production features.
• Proven track record owning complex product areas end to end.
• Ability to distill messy problems into clear points of view.
• Strong systems thinking and attention to detail.
• Excellent interaction and visual design craft.
• Experience pairing closely with engineers and ensuring quality.
• Comfort working in early-stage 0→1 environments.
• Established AI-enabled design practice.
• Conviction without ego; able to defend reasoning.
• Good judgment about research and customer learning.

Responsibilities

• Own major product areas from definition through launch and iteration.
• Shape Zed’s AI private banker and how it understands context and guidance.
• Turn complexity into clear product decisions with cross-functional teams.
• Make financial products easier to understand and trust.
• Move between invention and refinement across new and existing journeys.
• Prototype to think with appropriate fidelity for testing.
• Use AI as part of everyday design practice.
• Work directly with engineers and review builds to ensure quality.
• Build foundations for quality at scale with a design system.

Skills

Product design

Cross-functional

Systems thinking

Interaction design

Visual design

AI design

Early-stage

Conviction

Research judgment

Job description

About Zed

Zed is building the first AI-native, licensed neobank in the Philippines designed to democratize access to premium financial services for young professionals in global markets. The current banking system is broken, often shutting out the world’s youngest and fastest-growing consumer classes—we’re here to fix it.

Our team is uniquely positioned to solve this. We are Stanford engineers and former YC founders who have spent our careers at the intersection of banking and hyper-growth startups like Square, Facebook, and Box. We’ve been here before, having previously built and exited Symple (YC W'17), a fast-growing B2B payments company.

We are backed by world-class investors, including Accel, Valar, Immad Akhund (Mercury), Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator), and Kunal Shah (Cred).

The Role

We’re looking for an experienced product designer to help define the next phase of Zed’s product—from our core credit experience to an AI private banker that understands each customer’s context and helps them make better financial decisions. This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad ownership across product strategy, interaction design, and craft. You’ll lead through the work—setting direction, raising the quality bar, and bringing cross-functional partners with you.

You’ll report to Danielle, Zed’s cofounder and a product designer, and pair closely with engineers from the earliest idea through production. Design is part of how product decisions get made at Zed. You won’t be handed a settled roadmap and asked to polish the interface. You’ll help identify the problems worth solving, bring structure to ambiguous questions, and shape both the product logic and the experience customers see.

The design challenge is to make complex financial systems feel simple, fair, and trustworthy—and to define how an intelligent financial partner should explain itself, communicate uncertainty, recover from mistakes, and earn the right to guide a customer’s financial decisions.

What You’ll Do

• Own major product areas from definition through launch and iteration. Work across product framing, customer journeys, flows, prototypes, interaction and visual design, content, and production details.

• Shape Zed’s AI private banker. Define how it understands context, gives guidance, communicates confidence and uncertainty, explains recommendations, handles failure, and keeps customers in control.

• Turn complexity into clear product decisions. Partner with founders, engineering, risk, compliance, and operations to reconcile customer needs, technical possibilities, business goals, and regulatory constraints.

• Make financial products easier to understand and trust. Translate concepts like credit limits, repayment, underwriting decisions, transactions, fees, and financial recommendations into intuitive experiences.

• Move between invention and refinement. Explore new products from 0 1, improve the core journeys already in market, and fix the small paper cuts that determine how the product feels in everyday use.

• Prototype to think. Work at the level of fidelity the question requires, from rough explorations to production-ready interactions. Use prototypes to clarify ideas, test assumptions, and help the team make better decisions.

• Use AI as part of your everyday design practice. Apply it to explore problem spaces, generate and compare directions, surface edge cases, and increase the range and speed of what you can test—while bringing your own judgment to the outcome.

• Work directly with engineers, without a throw-it-over-the-wall handoff. Review builds, resolve tradeoffs together, and stay accountable for the quality of the experience through launch.

• Build the foundations for quality at scale. Evolve Zed’s lightweight design system, establish reusable patterns for financial and AI experiences, and help define a shared standard for what good looks like.

What You Bring

• 7+ years designing consumer software, with a portfolio that demonstrates strong product judgment, interaction design, and visual craft across work that shipped.

• A track record of owning complex product areas end to end, from an ambiguous early problem through a high-quality production experience—not just producing screens after the direction has been set.

• The ability to distill messy problems into clear points of view and focused solutions. You know which questions need to be answered, which details matter, and which can wait.

• Strong systems thinking and attention to detail. You can hold the end-to-end customer journey, underlying business logic, and behavior of an individual interaction in your head at the same time.

• Excellent interaction and visual design craft, with care for hierarchy, typography, content, states, motion, and the moments between screens.

• Experience pairing closely with engineers and enough technical fluency to explore possibilities, understand constraints, and protect design quality through implementation.

• Comfort in early-stage and 0 1 environments. You create structure where little exists, manage your own work, and move easily between strategy and execution.

• An established AI-enabled design practice. You already use AI as a practical tool for thinking, exploring, prototyping, and extending what you can make—not as an occasional experiment.

• Conviction without ego. You ask hard questions, advocate for what you believe is right, explain your reasoning clearly, invite critique, and change your mind when the work improves.

• Good judgment about research. You know when experience and rapid iteration are enough, and when a decision requires deeper customer learning.

Experience with fintech, credit, payments, AI, or another regulated or trust-sensitive product is useful, but not required. Familiarity with Southeast Asia or other emerging markets is also a plus.

Why Join Zed

• Design has real authority here. You’ll work with a designer-founder, contribute to foundational product decisions, and have a direct line between your judgment and what customers use.

• The design problem is unusually rich. Credit, underwriting, regulation, and AI all introduce complexity. The opportunity is to make that complexity feel clear, fair, and human for customers traditional banks have overlooked.

• You’ll help define a new interaction model for personal finance. Zed’s AI private banker is early enough for you to shape its principles, behaviors, personality, and experience foundations—not simply inherit them.

• We have the infrastructure to build for real. Zed is a BSP-supervised financial institution with a live credit card and real customers, backed by Accel, Valar, and experienced fintech founders and operators. At the same time, much of the product’s future is still unwritten.

• The team is small and the path from idea to production is short. You’ll work closely with founders and engineers, take meaningful ownership, and see the effect of your work directly.

• We’re building for a generation whose ambitions have outgrown the financial products available to them. You’ll have the opportunity to help define the financial relationship for young professionals across Southeast Asia and other emerging markets.

We hire exceptional people from diverse backgrounds because different perspectives build better products.

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate based on legally protected characteristics. We provide reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process.

Compensation includes salary, equity, and benefits. Final offers are based on role scope, location, and experience.