Head of Design, Product Design

BitGo•Palo Alto, CA

6d•$210,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

BitGo is looking for a design leader who still designs. You will manage and mentor the design team, own the design system, and sit next to the Chief Product Officer on business strategy. This is a player-coach role, and we mean it literally. You will carry your own design surfaces and ship them, alongside leading the team. Expect roughly 50% hands-on IC work to start, decreasing as the team scales. It will not go to zero — the person setting the craft bar should be practicing at it. We are not a design-forward company today. We intend to become one, and we want you to lead that shift. The design team is small, senior, and self-sufficient. Each designer owns a wide vertical outright — trading, staking, DeFi vaults, earn, wallets, financing — with deep product context and strong opinions about the work. They are running at capacity, which is part of why this role carries real IC load: you will pick up the retail mobile experience and design system rather than distributing that work across a team that is already full. What they have asked for is specific, and we are hiring against it: a leader who gets into the work early with product and engineering rather than arriving at the end, who can critique craft because they still practice it, who tells them plainly what the next level requires, and who gives the team air cover so they can do the deep work instead of patching to hit dates.

Requirements

Experience leading design in financial services.
Experience building and owning a design system at scale.
Hands-on proficiency in Figma and a role model for craft.
Currently shipping design work.
Ability to provide specific and actionable feedback in critiques.
Deep understanding of UX, strong product thinking, logical reasoning, and data-grounded decision-making.
Experience managing designers and improving their skills.
Technically literate, comfortable with APIs, data models, and engineering trade-offs.
Direct communicator, able to hold positions with stakeholders and change your mind when presented with better arguments.
Desire for the mandate to transform a technical, compliance-heavy platform into a design-led one.

Nice To Haves

Digital assets, or another domain of genuinely complex technical flows.
Experience in regulated environments such as broker-dealer, trust company, bank, or qualified custodian.
Experience with complex permissioning, approval workflows, or multi-entity account structures.
Design leadership at a company that underwent a similar transformation.

Responsibilities

Own your own design work, including surfaces directly and shipping them at the quality bar you are asking of everyone else. This includes discovery through spec, in Figma, in reviews, and on hard problems.
Manage and invest in the team's growth, providing explicit guidance on what the next level requires and assigning work that supports individual development. Feedback should be candid, specific, and focused on craft, while respecting the designers' existing ownership and autonomy.
Amplify the design team's visibility, voice, and strategic impact, representing design in strategy, roadmap, and architecture conversations, and advocating for the client experience.
Involve design upstream in discovery with product and engineering, not just at handoff, to shape long-term roadmaps and ensure the team builds toward a direction rather than absorbing late changes.
Own the design system and component library end-to-end, including tokens, patterns, governance, contribution model, and adoption across product teams. Translate company strategy into a flexible system that enables teams to ship scalable experiences.
Design the overall system for the platform, considering shared primitives like accounts, wallets, assets, entitlements, and approvals, rather than just individual screens.
Establish UX and systems thinking as a practice for the entire organization, enabling product managers, engineers, and business leads to frame client problems, map systems, and evaluate solutions against client needs.
Establish processes for a small team to move fast without losing quality, including critique, documentation, design review, and clean handoffs with engineering. Set and maintain the quality bar, including for AI-assisted work.
Demonstrate technical depth by reading technical designs, understanding constraints, and collaborating with engineering on compromises and broader changes. Engage with the team on hard edge cases, both design and crypto-related.
Act as the face of design, being present and known internally, and representing BitGo design externally with clients, partners, and candidates.