Principal Designer, Money Movement and Agentic Commerce

PayPal•San Jose, CA

65d•Hybrid

About The Position

This role sits within the broader Experience Design department which is made up of unique product design specialties including: Consumer, Merchant, Research, Content, Design Systems, and Operations. Experience Design is driving the design and experience strategy that will evolve the PayPal experience beyond the core transaction and into new realms of the end-to-end commerce journey. This includes dimensions that engage customers well before and after the point of a sales transaction with a brand or money exchange with a peer. It is an incredibly exciting time to join a design team that will be at the forefront of PayPal's product and brand transformation. No matter the role or level, all positions are nurtured and encouraged to think through critical problems with well-integrated, multi-discipline teams (pods) and a well-defined culture that's geared towards explorations, bold provocations, and speedy impact in the market. The department is led by PayPal's Chief Design Officer and works intimately with Engineering, Product Management, Brand Design, and Marketing teams. The Peer to Peer App pod defines the overall product architecture and positioning, navigation structure, and experiences that drive users into the wider PayPal money movement ecosystem, across the globe. Peer to Peer has both onsite app/web and offsite partnership surface experiences. Designers in this pod regularly must experiment and evolve information architecture, content strategy, visual design and layout, ingress points, brand design expressions, personalization, in-page navigation, and value propositioning. The experiences require one to radically simplify content without losing depth of content and utility. A designer also must understand how to blend hyper utility with brand defining visual expressions through an owned UI, interaction, motion and digital design language. Equal parts form and function, all designers in this pod should have a strength in art direction, composition, brand design, contrast/hierarchy, information architecture, navigation, and formulating clear strategic points of view that prop-up the positioning of the app's direct and differentiated value for our customers. The Principal Designer on our team serves as the Provocateur. They push the design thinking and generate concepts and opportunities that others have yet to consider or see. They are exceptional taste makers in terms of art direction, visual design, and brand expression within a digital product. As a Principal designer you serve as a creative director and leader of experience strategy for specific projects within a pod and will set the tone and standard for the design output for the product and more junior designers. Focused on craft, you will lead by example and drive the definition, strategy, and design concepts against specific briefs from the business and our product partners. While not a manager, you will find yourself mentoring and leading a small group of designers with a very minimal amount of administrative responsibility. 90-95% of this role is pure design and the level comes with an expectation that the design quality can spread not only within your pod but across pods and into our product design system team.

Requirements

You are kind, generous, nurturing, supportive, and can see beyond your own ideas or instincts.
You love to study and design for consumer behaviors with a specific interest in consumerism, retail, and evolving cultural norms.
You believe in the power of brand, a well-articulated point of view, and the necessity of driving measurable business outcomes.
A deep love and bias for designing products that blend interaction design with brand visual, and content design. All designers are expected to be as sensitive to visuals as they are to system and interaction details.
Magical powers come through your ability to add clarity to opportunities and to frame problems that drive designers and product work into new realms.
You love craft and are driven by refining and inventing new capabilities - either through broadened territories like motion design or technology/software tools.
Undeniable ability to inspire and provoke new thinking that can catalyze partners and designers on your respective teams.
You have a remarkable ability to set and evolve the vision of a product experience through your strategic storytelling, problem driven frameworks, insight gathering, comprehension of visual design and interactive design craft.
You have set new standards around design in your previous work and can demonstrate major shifts in quality and perspective.
Incredible ability to tell stories of your work through presentation design, prototypes, storytelling, and explicit connection to larger business strategies.
Deep understanding for how to motivate design work through explorations, concept development, and creative directions that draft off a core brand design system.
Proven ability to broaden a creative brief and introduce unexpected visionary concepts that evolve the orthodoxy and convention of a product experience, on behalf of the user's behaviors.
Ability to take calculated risks in concepts - pushing against some conventions while not straying too far that it becomes unusable or incongruent with a brand positioning or identity.
Thrive on provoking new thinking through design work - both in interaction, architecture and visual brand design terms.
You love being an independent contributor but also understand you are a leader that others will look up to and model against based on your insanely talented craft and visionary instincts.
12+ years of experience in consumer facing digital product design work.