Senior Design Director, Investing And Design Systems

Wealthfront is looking for a Design Director to support two key product areas: Investing and Design Systems. Reporting directly to the VP of Design, this role is ideal for the design leader who enjoys working across strategy, vision, team, and operations. This is for someone who is excited about having impact through the scope and quality of decisions they make—not a manager who expects to have impact through the number of people they manage.

Success in this role will require strong communication skills, strategic thinking, vision facilitation, a high bar for craft, and executional excellence. Building great financial products requires digging diligently into the details and going deep to untangle complex problems. We’re seeking a design leader who cares deeply about all phases of product development—from spark to shipped pixels. 

A passion for investing or experience building consumer financial technology products is highly desirable. Growing and managing your wealth is fundamental to being able to build the life you want with the people who matter most. This is a unique opportunity to be at the center of charting the next generation of technology innovation in investing products. If this gets you excited, we want to hear from you!

Design at Wealthfront Designers at Wealthfront are innovative, creative, strategic, and detail-oriented. We transform complex technology and concepts into clear, simple, and actionable experiences. It takes skill to make financial products appear simple. Simplicity is what empowers our clients to build long-term wealth on their own terms.

Designers at Wealthfront define problems, new opportunities and solutions. We use data, insights, and behavioral psychology. We understand and consult on our technology. We connect everything we do to our clients and our business. We actively collaborate with engineers, product managers, researchers, data scientists, legal, and compliance. We’re making big bets. Innovation is encouraged. We embrace learning. As such, we care much more about the magnitude of success versus percentage of times we are successful. 

At Wealthfront, Design is an equal partner to Engineering and Product. It plays an important role in the executive staff that collectively makes all critical strategic decisions. As a leader of the organization, your role will be to model this, develop these skills in your design teams, and contribute to the company-level design organization as a member of the design leadership team. 

We’re a remote-first team and open to candidates in the US.

Key responsibilities

Investing • Helping define the next set of innovative, best-in-class products for Investing through structured guidance, facilitating strategy and visioning workshops, etc.  • Product initiatives include our Automated Index Investing Account, our Stock Investing Account, Automated Bond Ladders, and more.

Design Systems • Defining quality for design at Wealthfront by ensuring our Design System is principled, elegant, and impactful. • Product initiatives include key components, product and content design patterns, accessibility, tooling, etc. to uplevel and improve efficiency for design and engineering, creating consistent, high quality, and performant experiences for our clients. 

Overall • Partnering with pm, eng, research, data science, legal, and compliance leads to identify, prioritize, and ship high-impact opportunities across Investing and Design Systems teams. • Driving company impact through supporting senior product and content designers: staffing, hiring, guiding the work, growing their skills, facilitating career development, cultivating excellent performance, and building an inclusive culture.  • Helping us innovate and scale as a company by partnering with leaders across Wealthfront. Identify and pursue impactful ideas on everything from what we build to how we work, such that we are able to learn as quickly and “lean-ly” as possible

Skills and experience

• 4+ years of design management experience in a software company with design embedded as part of cross-functional product development teams
• 10+ years of product design experience in a consumer software company
• You know when and how to get into the details to drive high-quality decisions
• You’re an exceptional product thinker who understands the business
• You have a proven track record setting a vision for great customer experiences, inspiring others to get behind a vision, translating a vision into a prioritized roadmap, and ensuring your team ships high quality experiences to bring the team’s vision to customers
• Your have strong communication, facilitation, and interpersonal skills
• You’ve helped your teams grow in their creative practice by teaching them how to effectively use tools such as user experience methods, innovation, ideation, storytelling, prototyping, design frameworks, concept visualization, problem-framing skills and design principles
• You’ve hired and grown a diverse team
• You’ve developed a respectful, inclusive culture where debate is welcomed
• You’ve managed performance across a spectrum of abilities and contexts
• You are naturally curious and are deeply interested in fintech
• Bonus: experience building modern fintech products

Mindset that excels at Wealthfront

• Approaching problems with curiosity and intellectual rigor
• Taking a learning-based approach: leveraging research, data, and experimentation to build confidence around decisions and assumptions
• Critically evaluating customer and business trade-offs
• Transforming complexity or ambiguity into clarity
• Taking a craft-led management mindset
• Driving alignment across teams and stakeholders
• Putting the company and the team first
• Going above and beyond to make the people around you successful
• Being enterprising and self-driven: moving with urgency, being solutions-oriented
• Being passionate our clients and our business
• Being excited to learn and grow with the company