Director of Product Design - Payments

Job description

ABOUT AIRWALLEX Airwallex is the only unified payments and financial platform for global businesses. Powered by our unique combination of proprietary infrastructure and software, we empower over 250,000 businesses worldwide – including Brex, Navan, Qantas, SHEIN and many more – with fully integrated solutions to manage everything from business accounts, payments, spend management and treasury, to embedded finance at a global scale. Proudly founded in Melbourne, we have a team of over 2,300 of the brightest and most innovative people in tech across 27 offices around the globe. Valued at US$11 billion and backed by world-leading investors including T. Rowe Price, Visa, Mastercard, Robinhood Ventures, Sequoia, Salesforce Ventures, DST Global, and Lone Pine Capital, Airwallex is leading the charge in building the global payments and financial platform of the future. If you’re ready to do the most ambitious work of your career, join us. ATTRIBUTES WE VALUE We hire successful builders with founder-like energy who want real impact, accelerated learning, and true ownership. You bring strong role-related expertise and sharp thinking, and you’re motivated by our mission and operating principles https://www.airwallex.com/us/operating-principles. You move fast with good judgment, dig deep with curiosity, and make decisions from first principles, balancing speed and rigor. You're humble and collaborative; turn zero‑to‑one ideas into real products, and you “get stuff done” end-to-end. You use AI to work smarter and solve problems faster. Here, you’ll tackle complex, high‑visibility problems with exceptional teammates and grow your career as we build the future of global banking. If that sounds like you, let’s build what’s next. We are seeking a visionary, hands-on Director of Product Design to define the future of Airwallex’s payments platform, the global infrastructure that powers how businesses accept payments online and in-person across currencies, methods, and markets. You will own the design strategy and execution of our core payments capabilities, including global e-commerce, point-of-sale, one-click-checkout, and risk and compliance-critical experiences. You’ll partner closely with product and engineering leaders across Payments and Risk teams, and lead a high-performing team of product designers building powerful payment experiences, APIs, and workflows. RESPONSIBILITIES PRODUCT & DESIGN STRATEGY - Define a clear, opinionated design strategy for how customers understand and use cash, high-yield, and credit accounts, and inter-account transfers as their organisation grows. - Partner with PM leaders to frame problems, prioritise opportunities, and ensure design is embedded early in product strategy, not only at execution time. - Establish moving money into, within, and out of Airwallex as a user experience foundation that other product areas (e.g. Spend management, Subscription billing, etc.) can build on top of. DESIGN LEADERSHIP & EXECUTION - Lead end-to-end experience design: Oversee research, object modeling, interaction design, research and testing, and UI design for your team’s products and features. - Raise the quality bar: Set and maintain a world-class standard for UX and UI quality in complex, data-rich screens (e.g. tables, charts, reconciliation views, approvals), ensuring work is robust and polished across desktop, mobile web, and native mobile apps. - Drive a rigorous discovery and validation practice: Ensure your teams use research, experimentation, and product analytics to understand customer behaviour. - Build a collaborative, growth-oriented design practice: Help shape the rituals, feedback practices, and shared standards that keep designers connected across regions and domains. - Integrate with design systems and platform patterns: Collaborate with the design system team to ensure your team’s experiences use and extend shared patterns. PEOPLE LEADERSHIP & ORG BUILDING - Lead and grow a high-performing design team: Manage and develop senior and staff-level product designers across our London and Singapore design studios, setting clear expectations for impact, craft, and ownership. - Create healthy, effective design-product-engineering partnerships: Develop ways of working that make collaboration with PMs and engineers productive, with design engaged from problem framing through to launch and iteration. REQUIREMENTS - Experience: 12+ years in product / UX design with significant time spent on complex, system-heavy products (e.g. B2B SaaS, developer platforms, financial or payments products). 4+ years leading designers, including managing senior designers or design managers. - Domain knowledge: Experience in online payments, risk & compliance, or adjacent financial products. - Design craft & systems thinking: Deep strengths in interaction design, information architecture, and UX for complex workflows and data-heavy products. Able to think at both the screen and system level: flows, states, permissions, object relationships, and edge cases. - Leadership & influence: Proven ability to set vision, align stakeholders, and lead multi-quarter initiatives that cut across multiple domains and teams. Comfortable debating trade-offs with senior product and engineering leaders, and advocating for customer outcomes with clarity and pragmatism. - Data- and research-informed: Familiar with partnering closely on user research and quantitative analysis to inform decisions, validate designs, and measure impact. - Communication & storytelling: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make complex financial and technical concepts accessible to diverse audiences. - Adaptability: Thrives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment with evolving priorities and ambiguous constraints. NICE TO HAVES - Background working with API products and developer-facing experiences. - Degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field. WORKING AT AIRWALLEX - We work in a hybrid model, with teams collaborating in-office and remotely across regions. - Airwallex is a high performance, high responsibility, high impact workplace where you’ll be expected to take ownership and ship meaningful work. - If you’re excited to design the financial operating system for modern businesses and lead a pivotal part of that experience, we’d love to hear from you. APPLICANT SAFETY POLICY: FRAUD AND THIRD-PARTY RECRUITERS To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com http://airwallex.com email address. Please apply only through careers.airwallex.com http://careers.airwallex.com or our official LinkedIn page. Airwallex does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Airwallex will not pay any fees to search firms/recruiters if a candidate is submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless an agreement has been entered into with respect to specific open position(s). Search firms/recruiters submitting resumes to Airwallex on an unsolicited basis shall be deemed to accept this condition, regardless of any other provision to the contrary. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY Airwallex is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and anyone seeking employment at Airwallex is considered based on merit, qualifications, competence and talent. We don’t regard color, religion, race, national origin, sexual orientation, ancestry, citizenship, sex, marital or family status, disability, gender, or any other legally protected status when making our hiring decisions. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.