Head of Design

Mesh•San Francisco, CA

2d•$229,000 - $300,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Mesh is seeking an exceptional Head of Design. 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.

Requirements

8+ years in product design, including 3+ years leading designers while staying hands-on.
Shipped consumer products at scale and can show the work.
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.
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.
You have changed the direction of a roadmap with a design argument, with executives and engineering leaders in the room.
You use AI aggressively in your own practice and are rethinking what design work is still worth doing by hand.

Nice To Haves

Payments or fintech experience is a plus, not a requirement.

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.