Product Designer

wavemm1; United States; Remote; USD 168,000 - 206,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance and retirement"

Parental leave

Generous vacation

Donation matching

Job summary

Wave is seeking an experienced mobile designer to expand features on Android and iOS apps, helping make financial services more accessible and inclusive for millions. You will collaborate with product managers, researchers, and engineers to design, prototype, and validate solutions.

You will contribute to the design system, run user research plans, and demonstrate strong visual craft, with an emphasis on removing friction and delivering high-quality experiences for a global customer base.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of end-to-end in-house experience, with a consumer focus on mobile apps.
• Experience with low and high-fidelity design & prototyping with LLMs on Android mobile apps.
• Fluency in English. French language skills are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with product managers, user researchers, engineers, and data analysts from the start to end of a feature.
• Create high quality designs, interactions, and prototypes to explore ideas in service of the best solution for the project (Wave uses Figma).
• Craft user research plans and work directly with our user researchers to identify problems and validate solutions in user testing.
• Contribute to Wave's design system and component library.
• Talk to customers and find solutions to their problems by thinking critically from their perspective.
• Communicate the reasoning behind your product decisions in review sessions and in conversation with PMs.
• Prototype visual and UX concepts and iterate towards the right solution (Wave uses Claude for mobile prototyping with Android apks).

Skills

Mobile design

Prototyping

User research

Design systems

Information architecture

Animation

Tools

Figma

After Effects

Lottie

Job description

Our mission

We're making Africa the first cashless continent.

In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason-the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.

We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast.

Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in...

How you'll help us achieve it

We are growing our product design team and looking for an experienced mobile designer to expand features on our Android and iOS apps. You will have the opportunity to make financial services more accessible and inclusive for millions of people through working with thoughtful product managers, researchers, and engineers!

In this role, you'll:

• Work closely with product managers, user researchers, engineers, and data analysts from the start to end of a feature.
• Create high quality designs, interactions, and prototypes to explore ideas in service of the best solution for the project (Wave uses Figma).
• Craft user research plans and work directly with our user researchers to identify problems and validate solutions in user testing.
• Contribute to Wave's design system and component library.
• Talk to customers and find solutions to their problems by thinking critically from their perspective.
• Communicate the reasoning behind your product decisions in review sessions and in conversation with PMs.
• Prototype visual and UX concepts and iterate towards the right solution (Wave uses Claude for mobile prototyping with Android apks).

Key details

This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our hiring hubs (US, UK, Spain, Kenya, Ghana, Canada) or in one of our operating markets in Africa, including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso.

You’ll travel to one of our key markets for a 1 week immersion trip with your immediate team (Wave covers all costs). Outside of this 1 week immersion, you’ll also travel to a market country with our product design lead and PMs, for a total of travel 2x a year. You're highly encouraged to visit market counties more often! We also provide a yearly stipend of $1,200 USD to meet with coworkers every year.

Our salaries are competitive and are calculated using a transparent formula. For this role, we are offering a salary of up to $187,000 USD based on your location (paid in your local currency equivalent), plus a generous equity package.

Major benefits:

• Subsidized health insurance for you and your dependents and retirement contributions (both vary from country to country)
• 6 months fully paid parental leave and subsidized fertility assistance
• Unlimited vacation with a 20-day minimum requirement, with most folks taking between 21-30 days exclusive of statutory holidays
• $10,000 annual charitable donation matching

Requirements

• Experience with low and high-fidelity design & prototyping with LLMs on Android mobile apps
• Fluency in English. French language skills are a plus.
• At least 6 years of end-to-end in-house experience, with a consumer focus on product design with mobile apps.
• Excellent visual and interaction design skills, with an eye at removing friction from flows
• Attention to detail and high level of visual craft
• Strong illustration and animation skills. We use After Effects and Lottie at Wave but anything that can be converted to a Lottie file works
• Ability to deliver high-quality designs with speed and polish
• Bias towards action. Identify UX improvements without waiting for the perfect conditions
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to think through complex interaction design as well as thinking about tradeoffs of each solution
• Curiosity for understanding and unpacking customer behaviors and needs
• Experience balancing business goals, customer needs, and technical tradeoffs, while explaining your point of view to the team

You might be a good fit if

• Are detail-oriented and able to balance multiple projects
• Can iterate separate concepts quickly to user test design bets. The ability to move fast and update designs based on customer feedback is an important quality we're looking for
• Think carefully about in-the-weeds details and their role within the design system
• Feel comfortable anticipating and designing for edge cases
• Enjoy pairing with designers, engineers, and product managers
• Are excited to learn about how a