Lead Designer, Digital Experience Standards

WEX•Chicago, IL

3d•$154,600 - $171,500

About The Position

As the Lead Designer for Digital Experience Standards at WEX Inc., you will set and uphold experience quality across the digital portfolio and codify it through scalable platforms. This senior individual-contributor role reports to the Director of Digital Platforms & Practice. You will shape how products look, sound, and feel as more experiences are generated by agents rather than assembled manually. The role is part of WEX’s centralized digital standards and practices group. It connects product-line design teams through shared standards, design systems, and AI-enabled practices, influencing quality across dozens of web and mobile experiences. You will partner with the branding team and coach designers rather than own a single product roadmap. You will establish and scale experience standards, design guidance, and evaluation practices so that high-quality, accessible, recognizable WEX experiences can be repeated across the portfolio. This includes defining quality criteria, creating reusable and machine-readable guidance for people and agents, developing agentic evaluation capabilities, and making portfolio quality visible to leadership and connected to customer and business outcomes. The position calls for approximately 8–10 years of product, system, web, or related design experience; exceptional visual/UI craft; systems thinking; practical fluency with AI coding and prototyping tools; customer empathy; and the ability to influence and coach collaboratively without direct authority. The role offers a base pay range of $154,600 to $171,500. WEX describes its comprehensive benefits as including health, dental and vision insurance, retirement savings, paid time off, health savings and flexible spending accounts, life and disability insurance, and tuition reimbursement, among other benefits.

Requirements

Approximately 8–10 years of product, system, web, or related design experience across multiple products or portfolios.
Demonstrated visual design taste, artistic judgment, attention to detail, and a high bar for polish and aesthetics across digital experiences.
Ability to define, document, and scale design standards, patterns, and systems that improve consistency and quality across teams and products.
Strong fluency with AI coding and prototyping tools, such as Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex, and practical ability to use them in design workflows.
Understanding of how to express design standards and context in reusable, structured formats such as Design MD/design.md for consistent use by people and AI agents.
Deep customer empathy and ability to translate customer needs, brand identity, tone, voice, and interaction principles into cohesive end-to-end experiences.
Collaborative, low-ego, outcome-focused approach and ability to influence designers and cross-functional partners without relying on direct authority.

Nice To Haves

Background in graphic design, web design, human factors, or another related artistic or design discipline.
Experience coaching or mentoring designers across multiple product teams or portfolios.
Familiarity with general-purpose AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini; this does not replace practical fluency with AI coding and prototyping tools.
UX boot camp experience.

Responsibilities

Define what good experience design looks like across the portfolio and encode it in standards, patterns, and reference examples usable by designers and agents.
Build a system that makes experiences recognizably consistent with WEX’s brand, tone, voice, and interaction principles across teams and agents.
Lead portfolio-level critique and calibration to build designers’ judgment and raise craft.
Develop a point of view on voice, conversational, and multimodal interaction so standards anticipate emerging customer needs.
Own the reusable components, skills, standards, and machine-readable context agents use to generate consistent UI in ADLC Foundations Hub and Discovery & Delivery Systems.
Partner with the design system engineer to translate design intent into tokens, patterns, schemas, and documentation that humans and agents can use.
Make accessibility, usability, and brand quality the default in generated experiences rather than relying solely on review.
Use AI-assisted coding and prototyping tools to explore concepts, test interactions, and operationalize repeatable design guidance.
Establish an enterprise experience-quality rubric with dimensions, criteria, and severity scales for usability, accessibility, brand and voice coherence, language clarity, and end-to-end journey quality.
Develop evaluation capabilities that let agents navigate live customer portals, mobile apps, and internal tools across full journeys and return evidence-backed findings.
Produce a portfolio-level experience-quality index and heat map showing strengths, weaknesses, and quality dimensions across lines of business.
Correlate experience quality with NPS, CSAT, and customer trust measures, using those signals to guide standards, coaching, and investment toward experiences with the highest customer risk.
Partner with product designers, engineering, and the branding team to unify and improve the quality and polish of WEX web and mobile products.
Coach and mentor designers across product teams, applying strong visual/UI judgment and attention to detail in a collaborative, outcome-focused way.

Benefits

Health insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Retirement savings plan
Paid time off
Health savings account
Flexible spending accounts
Life insurance
Disability insurance
Tuition reimbursement
Quarterly or annual bonus eligibility for non-sales roles, subject to role and applicable plan