Principal Product Designer, Consumer

Flex is a growth-stage, NYC-headquartered FinTech company creating the best rent payment experience. We’re changing how renters manage their most significant recurring expense by enabling flexible payment schedules that fit their finances and budget. Our mission is to empower as many renters as possible with flexibility over rent payments.

About the role

As a Principal Product Designer at Flex, you’ll solve problems for consumers across the country who are underserved by existing financial products. We’re handling people’s most significant recurring expense, so the stakes are high: a confusing screen or poorly handled edge case can cost someone a late fee, a credit mark, or a difficult conversation with their leasing office.

You’ll lead a full area of our business, shaping and driving the vision for your vertical while ensuring it connects seamlessly with the broader ecosystem. This is an individual contributor role with the influence of a leader—your impact comes from the artifacts you create, the standards you set, and the designers you elevate. You’ll dive deep into design exploration on critical projects, building prototypes that illustrate the direction of your work and unlock new opportunities.

This is a highly measured, cross-functional environment where designers bridge customer needs with creative solutions. You’ll collaborate with product managers, engineers, data analysts, risk, and compliance partners, and most designs will run as experiments before becoming the default. The best designers here are highly creative, data-curious, comfortable with constraints, and willing to adapt based on evidence.

Responsibilities

• Lead design for a full area of the business by shaping and driving the vision for your vertical, owning strategy and end-to-end execution.
• Connect and align multiple teams through complex design challenges, weaving separate visions into one cohesive ecosystem.
• Lead design exploration and solutions on the most critical projects, setting the standard by doing the work yourself.
• Set a high bar for quality across features, concepts, and innovative solutions through standards, critiques, and feedback.
• Design for people under real financial pressure, bringing clarity, honesty, and dignity to flows involving money and consequences, including error, pending, and recovery states.
• Build prototypes and artifacts that paint a picture of where your body of work is headed, aligning partners and leadership on key opportunities.
• Support strategic initiatives by leveraging qualitative research, data, industry trends, and design expertise.
• Partner with PM, analytics, risk, and engineering to structure experiments, define hypotheses, guardrails, and success metrics.
• Establish design-thinking methods and toolkits for other teams to adopt, ensuring a customer-centered approach.
• Evolve our Design System, Ultraviolet, including foundational patterns and visual language to provide good defaults.
• Establish and evolve standards for AI use across the product development lifecycle, from research to prototyping, and improve design-to-code quality with frontend engineering.

Requirements

• 10+ years designing and shipping consumer products, including time leading a product area or vertical.
• Track record of aligning several teams around a shared experience, with judgment to set standards or allow team autonomy.
• Fluency with experimentation and quantitative reasoning—comfort designing for A/B tests, reading funnel/cohort data, and adapting based on results.
• Strength in unglamorous states (errors, edge cases, pending, recovery) where trust is earned or lost.
• Comfort treating technical and regulatory constraints as design material, without needing translation.
• Evidence of raising the quality bar for peers through mentorship, critique, standards, or systems.
• Track record of designing simple, intuitive products powered by complex systems and edge cases.
• Ability to document and explain design processes and rationale, leveraging best practices, research, and data.
• Demonstrated aptitude for execution and team success.
• Strong native mobile app design experience (iOS and Android).
• Figma expertise and experience using AI tools for sketching and prototyping.
• Comfort with ambiguous problems and motivation to be a self-starter.
• Passion for improving everyday people’s financial well-being.
• A portfolio detailing contributions to shipped solutions.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech or regulated environments, designing disclosures or money movement flows with legal/compliance partners.
• Experience in experimentation-heavy product organizations where most changes ship behind a flag.
• Experience establishing new ways of working (design ops, rituals, toolkits, AI-assisted workflows) that teams adopted.

Pay

Flex uses a market-based approach to pay, with geographic adjustments based on cost of labor. Ranges for this role:

• Tier 1 (NYC/Bay Area): $240,000—$300,000 USD
• Tier 3 (Salt Lake City): $204,000—$255,000 USD

For locations outside these areas, pay will be adjusted to align with local market conditions.

Schedule

• Hybrid roles in New York, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City require 2–3 days per week on-site.
• Relocation assistance may be available for candidates outside these areas.

Benefits

For full-time U.S. employees:

• Competitive medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Company equity.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Unlimited paid time off + 13 company-paid holidays.
• Parental leave.
• Free Flex subscription.

For full-time non-U.S. employees:

• Competitive compensation + company equity.
• Unlimited PTO.