Senior Design Manager - Core Experiences

Mercury is a fintech company building intelligent financial software experiences. The Senior Design Manager will lead product designers responsible for core experiences, define Mercury’s interaction philosophy for AI-native interfaces, and partner with Product, Engineering, and Design Systems to create coherent, high-quality products.

Responsibilities:

• Define and evolve Mercury’s interaction philosophy, with a particular focus on how AI-native, conversational, adaptive, and proactive experiences should work across our products
• Set an exceptional bar for product quality across the Interfaces organization, helping teams like mobile, dashboard and our agentic product understand not only whether an experience works, but why it feels right
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of product designers, creating an environment where designers can take creative risks, develop strong points of view, and consistently produce exceptional work
• Shape product strategy alongside Product and Engineering rather than waiting for requirements to arrive. Bring design into ambiguous problems early and help teams identify the right problems to solve
• Stay close to the work. Use critique, prototyping, exploration, and hands-on collaboration to push ideas further and help teams turn ambitious concepts into thoughtful, pragmatic experiences
• Help raise the craft and product-thinking bar of Mercury’s broader Design organization, sharing frameworks, perspectives, and emerging ideas that make everyone around you a stronger designer

Requirements:

• You have unusually strong judgment about how great software should behave and feel. You can move beyond subjective critique to articulate why an interaction works, where it falls short, and how to make it substantially better. You bring strong visual and interaction design fundamentals and inspire a higher standard of craft in others
• You think deeply about how AI is changing the relationship between people and software. You're actively experimenting with conversational, adaptive, intelligent, and proactive interaction models and have opinions about where these patterns create genuine value and where they don't. You don't need to have spent your career building AI products, but you should be intensely curious about what comes next
• You've successfully led and developed product designers without becoming distant from the work. You know how to recognize what makes individual designers exceptional, give clear and thoughtful feedback, and create an environment where a team can experiment boldly while maintaining a very high quality bar
• You see beyond individual screens and features to the patterns, information architecture, behaviors, and principles connecting them. You can turn excellent individual solutions into reusable ideas that make the broader Mercury experience more coherent without making it formulaic
• You're a genuine thought partner to Product and Engineering. You bring design thinking into strategy and roadmap conversations, collaborate comfortably on unfinished work, understand technical constraints, and earn trust through judgment and execution
• You thrive when the problem matters but the answer isn't obvious. You can create structure where none exists, develop a perspective with incomplete information, and move work forward without significant coaching or prioritization. You balance conviction with curiosity and pragmatism and know when a great idea is worth fighting for
• Experience designing AI-powered or consumer software, strong prototyping skills, close partnership with Design Systems, or deep motion and interaction expertise would all be especially relevant, but we care more about the quality of your thinking and work than checking every box