Head of Design

At Mesh, our mission is to enable consumers to pay and be paid with any asset. Today, trillions of dollars in tokenized assets exist but remain largely unusable for everyday commerce. Mesh is bridging this gap by making crypto payments reliable, useful, and ubiquitous. We combine a powerful orchestration engine with a seamless consumer app to unlock liquidity for the world. Backed by leading investors like PayPal Ventures, Paradigm, and Galaxy Ventures, we are building the infrastructure for the next era of the global economy.

About the role

A great crypto payments product is deceptively simple: pick an asset, pay, done. But we serve everyone from prediction markets to crypto exchanges to neobanks, and the user's mental model shifts with the merchant ... sometimes they're thinking in dollars, sometimes in ETH. Underneath, crypto is deeply fragmented ... hundreds of wallets, dozens of exchanges and networks ... so the product must quietly swap, bridge, and pay fees just to work. Every seam the user sees is a moment of hesitation, and in payments, hesitation is death. Your job is to design one system that absorbs all of this and disappears. Then go further ... rewards, just-in-time lending, and more.

To succeed in this role, the thinking comes first. Before any pixels, someone has to decide what the user believes is happening ... and make every screen, state, and word consistent with that belief. You must be world class at that, and world class at the craft itself. This is a hands-on role. You will also build and lead the team. Crypto and payments experience is nice to have; exceptional design is mandatory.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end Mesh experience. The consumer app, and every merchant surface ... from first impression to failure states, error recovery, and support handoffs. If a person sees it, it's yours.
• Own design's hardest problems, hands-on. Which mental model each merchant type gets, what we standardize versus customize, when a flow ships versus needs another pass ... and the flows where those decisions live: deposits, swaps, bridging, fiat on-ramps, failure recovery. You are the tiebreaker on experience questions, and roughly half your time is in the work itself.
• Own the team. Manage, coach, and grow the designers on the team today, and hire as we scale. You set the bar for design talent at Mesh ... and you build the team that can hold it.
• Reinvent design for the AI era. AI is changing what a designer produces, how fast, and what's worth doing by hand. Decide how design works at Mesh ... the tools, the workflows, the ratio of prototypes to specs ... and evolve the function ahead of the curve, not behind it.
• Represent design at the exec table. Bring evidence-backed positions to roadmap and customer decisions with the CEO, CTO, and SVP Product. Design is in the room where direction gets set ... you are that presence.

Requirements

• Experience: 8+ years in product design, including 3+ years leading designers while staying hands-on. You have shipped consumer products at scale and can show the work.
• High Stakes: A track record of designing for complex systems where users really care when it doesn't work ... money movement, health, infrastructure, etc. Your portfolio holds up under failure, not just on the happy path.
• First-Principles Thinking: You originate the frame, you don't just execute it. You can point to products where the conceptual model was yours ... and explain the alternatives you rejected and why.
• Executive Influence: You have changed the direction of a roadmap with a design argument, with executives and engineering leaders in the room.
• AI Leverage: You use AI aggressively in your own practice and are rethinking what design work is still worth doing by hand.
• Domain: Payments or fintech experience is a plus, not a requirement.

Pay

The annual base salary range for this role is $229,000 - $300,000, plus equity, in San Francisco or New York. We have a strong preference for candidates based in San Francisco. The compensation range provided may span multiple career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on factors including a candidate's experience, skills, qualifications, and geographic location. For candidates outside of San Francisco or New York, compensation will be adjusted to reflect the applicable market and location-based pay band. The base salary range listed excludes equity and benefits.

Schedule

Employees based in our San Francisco, New York, and Bangalore hubs are expected to work from the office at least 40% of the time (approximately two days per week). This expectation may vary slightly depending on role, team, and business needs. Certain roles that require closer cross-functional collaboration or operational support may have additional in-office requirements, which will be discussed during the interview process.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity that grows as you and the company grow.
• Comprehensive health coverage for you and your family.
• Unlimited PTO—and we mean it. Take the time you need to recharge and show up at your best.
• Dedicated budget for courses, conferences, and certifications.
• Remote-friendly approach with top-tier tools and equipment.

Why you'll love it here

At Mesh, you're not stepping into a typical role—you're joining a rocket ship in mid-liftoff. You'll tackle complex, meaningful problems that actually move an industry forward, working alongside a sharp, motivated team that moves quickly, collaborates deeply, and expects everyone to operate with ownership. This is the kind of place where you'll see your work ship fast, make real impact, and be able to point to something and say, "I built that." You'll grow fast, level up your skills, and get a front-row seat to how a high-growth company scales from the inside.