Senior Design Manager - Growth

Mercury; Portland (OR); On-site; USD 229,000 - 286,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercury is seeking a Growth Design Manager to lead design across Mercury's Growth organization, partnering with Product and Engineering to shape strategy and deliver compelling customer experiences.

You will foster a team of designers, move teams from intuition to evidence through experiments and customer insights, and raise the quality bar across web presence, activation, and product journeys while maintaining space for judgment and creativity.

Qualifications

• Experience leading and developing high-performing product or growth designers.
• Track record of using design to drive measurable business outcomes.
• Excellent design thinker with strong visual and product judgment.
• Comfortable moving between leadership modes.
• Passion for developing people and mentoring designers.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the designers across Mercury’s Growth organization, providing context, coaching, and feedback.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to shape Growth strategy and convert opportunities into experiences.
• Use experimentation and customer insight to inform what we build next.
• Raise the quality bar across Mercury’s web presence, conversion, activation, virality, and customer experience.
• Create clarity in an ambiguous problem space about which problems matter and how to execute.
• Build systems and operating practices to scale Growth Design while preserving creativity and judgment.
• Grow the team thoughtfully and maintain a high bar as the organization expands.

Skills

Leadership

Growth design

Experimentation

User insight

Product judgment

Strategic thinking

Coaching

Communication

Independent work

Job description

Charles and Ray Eames designed chairs. They also designed houses, exhibitions, films, toys, graphics, and one particularly famous lounge chair.

What connected their work wasn’t a medium. It was a way of thinking. They studied how people behaved, experimented constantly, and moved fluidly between the smallest details and the systems surrounding them. The result was work that made complicated things feel remarkably simple.

Growth design at Mercury requires a similar range.

Our Growth teams work across the journey people take with Mercury, from discovering us on the web to becoming a customer, finding value in the product, and eventually bringing other people along with them. That means the design problems are unusually varied. One day might involve rethinking how someone understands Mercury for the first time. Another might mean finding friction in activation, designing an experiment around conversion, or creating a new loop that helps a great product travel further.

We’re looking for a Growth Design Manager to lead design across this portfolio.

In this role, you’ll:

• Lead and develop the designers working across Mercury’s Growth organization, giving them the context, coaching, and feedback they need to do exceptional work
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to shape Growth strategy, identify high-leverage opportunities, and turn them into compelling customer experiences
• Help teams move from intuition to learning by using experimentation, customer insight, and business results to inform what we build next
• Raise the quality bar across a broad set of experiences, from Mercury’s public web presence through conversion, activation, virality, and customer experience
• Create clarity across an inherently ambiguous problem space. You’ll help teams decide which problems matter, where design can have the greatest impact, and what excellent execution looks like
• Build the systems and operating practices that allow Growth Design to scale without becoming mechanical. You’ll create enough structure to help teams move quickly while preserving room for judgment, creativity, and ambitious ideas
• Grow the team thoughtfully, helping us identify what kinds of designers we need and maintaining a high bar as the organization expands

You should:

• Have experience leading and developing high-performing product or growth designers, including coaching senior designers through ambiguous, consequential work
• Have a track record of using design to drive measurable business outcomes. You understand experimentation and growth mechanics, but you don’t sacrifice customer experience in pursuit of a metric
• Be an excellent design thinker with strong visual and product judgment. You can evaluate the details of an experience while also seeing the larger system it belongs to
• Be comfortable moving between leadership modes. Sometimes the team needs a strategic thought partner, sometimes a sharp critique, sometimes organizational clarity, and sometimes someone willing to get close to the work
• Care deeply about developing people. You can set a high bar, give direct and thoughtful feedback, recognize what makes individual designers exceptional, and help them grow
• Be curious about why people behave the way they do. The best growth ideas often begin with understanding a customer rather than staring at a funnel
• Be comfortable operating independently in a fast-moving environment where the answer often isn’t obvious at the beginning

You don’t need to have spent your entire career with “Growth” in your title. Excellent candidates could come from product design, growth design, consumer products, commerce, or other environments where design quality and business performance are deeply connected.

What matters is that you can build a team capable of doing both: make Mercury easier to discover, understand, and adopt while making the experience itself better along the way.

*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC‑insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

Mercury values diversity & belonging and is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All individuals seeking employment at Mercury are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities or special needs. If you need assistance, or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know once you are contacted about a role.

Total Rewards

The total rewards package at Mercury includes base salary, equity (stock options/RSUs), and benefits.

Our salary and equity ranges are highly competitive within the SaaS and fintech industry and are updated regularly using the most reliable compensation survey data for our industry. New hire offers are made based on a candidate’s experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers.

Our target new hire base salary ranges for this role are the following:

US employees (any location):

$228,700—$285,900 USD

Canadian employees (any location):

$216,200—$270,200 CAD