Principal Product Designer, Consumer

Flex

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 240,000 - 300,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Company equity

401(k) with company match

Unlimited PTO

Parental leave

Free Flex subscription

Job summary

Flex, a NYC-headquartered FinTech, is seeking a Principal Product Designer to lead a full area of our business, shaping the vision and owning end-to-end execution across disciplines. You will connect product, engineering, data, risk, and compliance to deliver clear, user-centered experiences that perform under real financial pressure.

In this highly cross-functional, measured environment, you’ll set standards, evolve our Design System Ultraviolet, and drive AI-enabled workflows while mentoring

Qualifications

10+ years designing consumer products and leading a product area.
Experience aligning multiple teams around a shared experience.
Strong experience with experimentation, data, and A/B testing.
Proven ability to handle edge cases and build trust through reliability.
Experience evolving design systems and scalable UI patterns.
Familiarity with AI-assisted design workflows and tooling.
Strong mobile design experience for iOS and Android.
Proficient in Figma and prototyping tools.
Comfort navigating fintech regulatory constraints in design.
Proven track record mentoring designers and elevating teams.

Responsibilities

Lead design for a full area of the business by shaping and driving the vision for your vertical, and owning the strategy and end-to-end execution that delivers it.
Connect and align multiple teams through complex design challenges, weaving separate visions into one cohesive ecosystem.
Lead design exploration and solutions on the most critical projects across your area, staying close enough to the work to set the standard by doing it.
Consistently set a high bar for quality across features, concepts, and innovative solutions. Hold the bar through the standards you define, the critiques you lead, and the feedback you give designers on any team your area touches.
Design for people under real financial pressure by bringing clarity, honesty, and dignity to flows where money and consequences are involved, including the error, pending, and recovery states that are easy to leave for last.
Build the prototypes and artifacts that paint a picture of where your body of work is headed, and use them to align partners and leadership on the opportunities worth going after.
Play a pivotal role in strategic initiatives by supporting your team and company strategy with a wide range of inputs: qualitative research, data, industry trends, and your own design expertise.
Partner with PM, analytics, risk, and engineering to structure experiments. Define hypotheses to test, what a guardrail should protect, and what a result would actually prove.
Establish design-thinking methods and toolkits that other teams can pick up and use, so a customer-centered approach doesn’t depend on you being in the room.
Evolve our Design System, Ultraviolet, including its foundational patterns and our visual language so every team inherits good defaults instead of reinventing them.
Establish and evolve the standards for how we use AI across the product development lifecycle, from research and exploration to prototyping, and work with frontend engineering to improve design-to-code quality

Skills

Product area leadership

Cross-team alignment

Experimentation & analytics

Edge cases handling

Design systems

AI-assisted workflows

Native mobile design (iOS/Android)

Figma expert

Regulatory fintech awareness

Mentorship / leadership

Tools

Figma

AI prototyping tools

Design systems tooling

Job description

Flex is a growth-stage, NYC headquartered FinTech company that is creating the best rent payment experience. It’s hard to believe that it’s 2026 and paying rent on time is expensive, inflexible, and difficult. We’re here to change that! Flex enables our users to pay rent throughout the month on a schedule that better fits their finances and budget. Our mission is to empower as many renters as possible with flexibility over their most significant recurring expense. After deliberately keeping a stealth profile as we built up unprecedented investor support and an enthusiastic user base, we are looking for motivated individuals to help us keep our mission growing. Will you be a part of the team?

About the role

As a Principal Product Designer at Flex, you’ll solve problems for consumers across the country who are underserved by existing financial products. We’re handling people’s most significant recurring expense, which means the stakes of getting the experience right are real: a confusing screen or a poorly handled edge case can cost someone a late fee, a credit mark, or a difficult conversation with their leasing office.

We’re looking for a designer to lead a full area of our business. You’ll shape and drive the vision for your vertical, and you’ll be accountable for how it connects to everything around it. The experience only holds together if someone is responsible for the whole of it, not just their team’s slice. That means setting direction, aligning several teams around one coherent picture, and raising the quality bar across all of them.

This is an individual contributor role with the influence of a leader. Your leverage comes from the artifacts you make, the standards you set, and the designers you make better, not from a reporting line. You’ll still be deep in the work leading design exploration on the most critical projects, and building the prototypes that show where a body of work is headed and what it will unlock.

This is a highly measured, highly cross-functional environment, with a big opportunity for designers to bridge true customer needs with creative solutions. You’ll work alongside product managers, engineers, data analysts, risk, and compliance partners, and most of what you design will run as an experiment before it becomes the default. The designers who do their best work here are highly creative with solutioning, curious about the numbers, comfortable with constraints, and willing to change their minds when the evidence says to. All of your design skills will be put to use, from design thinking to interaction design and visual design.

What you’ll do

Lead design for a full area of the business by shaping and driving the vision for your vertical, and owning the strategy and end-to-end execution that delivers it
Connect and align multiple teams through complex design challenges, weaving separate visions into one cohesive ecosystem
Lead design exploration and solutions on the most critical projects across your area, staying close enough to the work to set the standard by doing it
Consistently set a high bar for quality across features, concepts, and innovative solutions. Hold the bar through the standards you define, the critiques you lead, and the feedback you give designers on any team your area touches
Design for people under real financial pressure by bringing clarity, honesty, and dignity to flows where money and consequences are involved, including the error, pending, and recovery states that are easy to leave for last
Build the prototypes and artifacts that paint a picture of where your body of work is headed, and use them to align partners and leadership on the opportunities worth going after
Play a pivotal role in strategic initiatives by supporting your team and company strategy with a wide range of inputs: qualitative research, data, industry trends, and your own design expertise
Partner with PM, analytics, risk, and engineering to structure experiments. Define hypotheses to test, what a guardrail should protect, and what a result would actually prove
Establish design-thinking methods and toolkits that other teams can pick up and use, so a customer-centered approach doesn’t depend on you being in the room
Evolve our Design System, Ultraviolet, including its foundational patterns and our visual language so every team inherits good defaults instead of reinventing them
Establish and evolve the standards for how we use AI across the product development lifecycle, from research and exploration to prototyping, and work with frontend engineering to improve design-to-code quality

Key qualifications

10+ years designing and shipping consumer products, including time leading a product area or vertical rather than a single team
A track record aligning several teams around a shared experience, and the judgment to know when to set a standard versus when to let a team solve it their own way
Fluency with experimentation and quantitative reasoning. You’re comfortable designing for A/B tests, reading funnel and cohort data, and changing your mind when the result disagrees with you
Strength in the unglamorous states (errors, edge cases, pending, and recovery) where a product either earns trust or loses it
Comfort treating technical and regulatory constraints as design material rather than obstacles, without needing them translated for you
Evidence of raising the quality bar for people around you: mentorship, critique, standards, or systems that outlasted your involvement
Track record of designing simple, intuitive products that are powered by complex systems and edge cases
Comfort documenting and explaining your design process and rationale behind decisions, including leveraging best practices, research, and data
Demonstrated aptitude for getting things done to make your team successful
Strong native mobile app design experience (iOS and Android)
Figma expert, and experience using AI tools to sketch and prototype
Comfort with ambiguous problems and the motivation to be a self-starter
Passion for improving every day people’s financial well being
A portfolio of work detailing your contributions to shipped solutions

Nice to have

Experience in fintech or another regulated environment, designing disclosures or money movement flows alongside legal and compliance partners
Experience in an experimentation-heavy product organization where most changes ship behind a flag
Experience establishing new ways of working, through design operations, rituals, toolkits, or AI-assisted workflows, that a team adopted and kept

Compensation

Flex takes a market-based approach to pay, ensuring compensation is commensurate with a candidate's experience and our internal leveling guidelines. For candidates located in our Tier 1 (NYC/Bay Area) and Tier 3 (Salt Lake City) markets, the base salary pay range for this role is below. Flex utilizes a geographic pay differential based on a cost of labor index. If you are located outside of the cities listed below, your starting pay will be adjusted to align with the market conditions of your specific geographic zone. Please speak with your recruiter for additional information regarding the specific range for your location.

Tier 1 (NYC/Bay Area)

$240,000 - $300,000 USD

Tier 3 (Salt Lake City)

$204,000 - $255,000 USD

Life at Flex

We understand that it takes a diverse team of highly intelligent, curious, determined, empathetic, and self-aware people to grow a successful company. Our HQ is located in New York City, but we have employees located throughout the US, Australia, Canada and South America. We are growing quickly, but deliberately, with a focus on building an inclusive culture. Our dynamic team has incredible perspectives to share, just as we know you do, and we take great pride in being an equal opportunity workplace.

Offices

Roles posted in New York, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City are hybrid positions with on-site expectations of 2-3 days per week in our local offices. For candidates outside of these areas, you may be eligible for our relocation assistance program.

Benefits

For full-time U.S. employees we offer: