Staff Product Designer

Job description

**Company Overview:** Zocks is an AI platform transforming how financial advisors work. Starting in the US financial services market, we're building technology that supports advisors across their entire workflow - from sales and meeting preparation to note-taking, follow-ups, scheduling, email, document intelligence, reporting, and integrations with the systems they use every day. Our goal is to take repetitive, manual work out of the advisor-client relationship and turn conversations, documents, and data into actions automatically. As our platform expands across more workflows, customers, and use cases, we're solving increasingly complex challenges around AI, real-time systems, data, security, integrations, and scale. Zocks is headquartered in San Francisco, while our **entire R&D organization - Engineering, Product, Design, Data, and Infrastructure - is based in Budapest**. This means **our Budapest teams don't just execute on a product built elsewhere: they're directly responsible for shaping the product, technology, and how we build them as we grow**. **Location: Budapest, XI., Science Park (On-site Monday to Thursday, Remote on Fridays)** **About the Role** You'll be the first **Staff Product Designer** at Zocks. That means two things simultaneously: doing the work and building the practice. There's no playbook for what this level looks like here yet. You'll help write it. That requires earning trust, demonstrating value in ways that are visible to leadership, and navigating ambiguity that goes beyond any individual project. If that sounds like a challenge you'd lean into rather than away from, this role is for you. This comes with real strategic ownership, direct partnership with leadership, and the autonomy to drive initiatives that shape our product and design culture. If you're a senior IC who wants strategic influence without direct reports, this is the role. You'll lead through craft, systems thinking, and mentorship, not headcount. ### To give you a better sense of what you'll be working on, here are some recent UX challenges we've been tackling: - Presence and capture are in conflict. Advisors need to stay fully engaged with their clients, but our AI needs their attention to be useful. We're reimagining the live meeting experience to make that tension invisible to the user. - Small screen, high stakes. Advisors access AI assistance in moments between meetings, on the move, under pressure. We're defining the mobile experience from scratch, establishing interaction patterns for AI-generated content where space is scarce and interruptions are constant. - The most important information in a financial document is rarely the most visible. We're building features that help advisors find, understand, and act on what matters, which raises hard questions about trust, accuracy, and designing for confidence when the system might be wrong. - Data sync is a trust problem, not a technical one. When information lives in multiple places and gets out of sync, advisors lose confidence in the tool. We're redesigning these flows so advisors trust their data without thinking about it. ### What You'll Do: - **Own design for complex product areas.** You'll lead end-to-end design for the work that matters most and has the least clear path forward, from discovery through launch, defining both what we build and how we build it. - **Elevate craft and establish quality standards.** You'll set the bar through your own work and raise team capabilities through critique, design reviews, and collaborative problem-solving. You'll help designers think more strategically, not just execute more cleanly. - **Influence product direction.** You'll join product and strategy discussions as a peer, bringing design perspective to roadmap decisions early. You'll proactively identify opportunities, advocate for user needs, and make sure we're solving the right problems, not just solving problems well. - **Partner with leadership on design strategy and systems.** Shape our design practice by establishing the patterns, frameworks, and standards that let the team maintain quality. You'll identify which infrastructure actually unblocks the work, then build it thoughtfully, without over-engineering it. - **Raise the room.** You make the designers around you sharper. Through how you critique, how you frame problems, and how you approach work that has no clear answer. ### What You Need: - **AI product experience.** You've led design for AI-powered products and understand the design challenges that come with them: how to make intelligent systems feel trustworthy, how to design for outputs you can't fully predict, and how to build user confidence in technology that's still evolving. - **AI tooling.** You use LLMs to think through problems, surface edge cases, and move faster. You're comfortable enough in tools like Cursor or Claude Code to turn ideas into something tangible without waiting for engineering. - **Deep product design experience.**You have deep experience leading design for complex B2B or enterprise products. Not just executing, but shaping what gets built and why. Your portfolio shows both strategic impact and craft. - **Design leadership.**You've shaped direction beyond your immediate work, earning trust through craft and judgment rather than formal authority. - **Comfort with ambiguity.** You thrive when problems aren't well-defined. You can scope initiatives independently, decide where to focus, and drive work from concept to impact with minimal guidance. - **Builds in 0-to-1 contexts.** You've helped establish a design practice, not just work within one. You've built design systems or established patterns that helped teams ship faster and maintain quality. You know how to create structure without over-engineering it, and how to make progress before everything is figured out. - **Judgment under pressure.** In a resource-constrained environment you can't do everything at full rigor. You know when to go deep and when to move fast, and you make that call confidently. - **Technical fluency.** You can engage with engineering on technical decisions and understand how constraints shape design options. You develop fluency quickly in technical domains new to you. - **Fluent Hungarian and English** language knowledge. ### Bonus points for: - Background in startups or high-growth environments. - Experience in fintech, wealthtech, or productivity tools. - Some HTML/CSS or coding experience.