Senior Product Designer

Kikoff is a FinTech unicorn focused on providing affordable financial tools to help consumers achieve financial security. The Senior Product Designer will own the product design process, working closely with cross-functional teams to create impactful user experiences and drive product metrics.

Responsibilities:

• Own your product area like a business owner
• Track the key metrics that matter for your surface – conversion, engagement, retention, revenue impact – and treat them as your own scorecard, not just your PM's
• Proactively surface product gaps and opportunities before they're on the roadmap, and come with a POV on what to build next and why
• Own design end-to-end for your product area – from problem framing and early exploration through pixel-perfect delivery – in close partnership with Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing
• Regularly challenge PRDs before executing: reframe problems, propose alternative solution directions, and push back when the initial framing isn't right
• Bring your own data, user insight, or competitive context when you do – not just instinct
• Use AI tools to compress the distance between idea and alignment
• Build interactive prototypes, functional demos, and testable mockups fast – using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex – so decisions get made on real artifacts instead of static mocks
• Shipping a working demo in a day should feel normal
• Design highly polished, visually compelling interfaces with a strong point of view on typography, color, layout, visual hierarchy, and motion – across mobile and responsive web
• Run rigorous multi-directional explorations before converging, and know how to sell a direction with a well-constructed rationale grounded in user outcomes and business impact – not just aesthetics
• Drive design system evolution for your surface area – contributing new patterns, documenting usage, and coordinating with engineering to validate before shipping
• Lead and participate in design critiques, giving specific, principled feedback tied to design principles and user outcomes
• Hold the detail bar: every interaction, state, edge case, and visual decision is considered before handoff

Requirements:

• 6–10 years of product design experience, with a portfolio demonstrating exceptional visual craft and evidence of problem-framing – not just execution
• Fluency in the business layer. You are not just a strong designer. You are a mini-CEO for your product area. You understand conversion funnels, retention curves, and the revenue model well enough to reason about tradeoffs
• A track record of finding problems before they're assigned. You've identified a significant opportunity, built the case for it, and driven it to the roadmap — not just executed on what was handed to you
• Comfort operating with autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment — you define the process, not wait for it
• Hands-on fluency with AI design, prototyping, and coding tools
• A strong eye for typography, color, layout, and motion, with the ability to articulate why each decision serves the user and the product
• Experience designing consumer-facing mobile and web products; comfort moving fluidly across fidelity levels without losing quality at any stage
• A demonstrated design systems contributor – someone who thinks in reusable patterns and has added meaningfully to a shared component library
• Proficiency in Figma; strong prototyping instincts, especially for interaction and motion concepts that are hard to communicate statically
• The ability to build cross-functional buy-in using evidence and clear rationale – not just preference or aesthetics
• A low-ego collaborator who raises the bar through critique, mentorship, and shared craft standards
• Bonus points if the portfolio shows how your design work moved a metric or changed a product strategy