Vice President, Product Design

About the role

Archer is collaborating with BNY to connect them with exceptional professionals for this Vice President, Product Designer role within the AI Hub team, based in New York, NY.

Design, product, and engineering don't hand off to each other — they co-create. The team works from a shared repo that serves as a single source of truth: outcomes, strategy, personas, prototypes, even presentations when needed. Everything lives in one place and informs everything else in real time. A designer might start the morning synthesizing user research, open a repo, and have a testable concept in front of stakeholders by the afternoon.

How products are created is shifting, and the team is embracing the opportunity and changing quickly. AI-enabled shifts allow more time crafting deeply user-centric experiences with deliberate outcomes. When generation handles execution, designers focus on the problem, the user, and the quality of the experience.

Responsibilities

• Make complexity clear: design experiences for genuinely hard systems — multi-step workflows, cross-platform journeys, enterprise-scale data — that make sense to the people who depend on them.
• Understand the problem at depth before touching anything; drive concept development from day one, bringing ideas from research and outcomes to prototyped form fast.
• Demonstrate possibilities rather than describing them; use AI-assisted tools to close the distance between design intent and working experience.
• Own the design of end-to-end experiences: map journeys across users, teams, and systems; identify where things break, where friction accumulates, and what needs to be rebuilt versus refined.
• Operate across the full scope of a platform experience, not just the screens in front of you.
• Contribute to a design system built for how design works now — structured as machine-readable infrastructure, not just a component library. Tokens carry semantic meaning; patterns encode reasoning about when and why they apply; AI agents consume it directly alongside human developers.
• Communicate design as a point of view, not a deliverable: articulate rationale behind decisions, help product managers and engineers understand tradeoffs, make design legible to non-designers without dumbing it down.
• Mentor through example: raise the standard of work through critique, collaboration, and problem-solving approach — not through title.

Requirements

Required

• Strong product design fundamentals: research synthesis, interaction design, systems thinking, visual craft
• Experience designing complex systems: enterprise software, multi-step workflows, data-heavy interfaces
• Demonstrated comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the problem isn't handed to you pre-formed
• Ability to communicate design rationale to mixed audiences (product, engineering, business) and hold your perspective under pressure

Preferred

• Already work with AI-assisted tools, not just for ideation but for building and prototyping
• Experience in shared codebases or repos with cross-functional teams, or actively moving in that direction
• Can describe a moment when AI changed how you approached a design problem — not made it faster, but made it different
• Contributed to a design system at the pattern or systems level, not just component execution

What will set you apart

• Work at the intersection of design and technical implementation, close to the material, not downstream from it
• Have felt the industry shift happening and leaned toward it
• Process produces things, not documents
• Deep excitement for and understanding of the opportunity AI creates for design, even if you haven't fully arrived there yet — you're moving fast

Portfolio

A portfolio is required, but the most compelling evidence may not look like a traditional design portfolio. The team wants to see how you actually create products: working alongside product managers and engineers in real time, from research to something shippable, reflecting how modern product teams operate.

• Show a process, a repo, a prototype you built directly, a decision you influenced in the room
• If you've worked in a shared codebase or repo with cross-functional partners, bring that to life
• If you've used AI tools to get from insight to working experience faster, bring that to life
• Complex systems thinking, end-to-end journey work, evidence of design decisions that improved the experience and why

Format doesn't matter — Figma files, PDFs, personal sites, live products. Show the work that best reflects how you think and what you shaped. Typically 5 or more years of experience, or equivalent demonstrated through portfolio and impact.

About the company

At BNY, the culture enables the company to run better and supports employees' growth and success. As a leading global financial services company at the heart of the global financial system, BNY influences nearly 20% of the world's investible assets. Teams harness cutting-edge AI and breakthrough technologies to collaborate with clients, driving transformative solutions that redefine industries and uplift communities worldwide. Recognized as a top destination for innovators, BNY is where bold ideas meet advanced technology and exceptional talent.