Principal Experience Designer, Customer Resolution

PayPal•San Jose, CA

1d•$198,000 - $323,950•Hybrid

About The Position

We’re hiring a Principal Designer to lead high-stakes customer experiences across disputes, account limitations, and recovery. How we handle these moments defines customer trust—not just in the experience, but in the company itself. This role will redefine how we design for moments of failure and recovery, transforming fragmented, opaque processes into cohesive, transparent systems that build long-term trust. You’ll shape how we prevent, navigate, and resolve complex financial issues while balancing customer needs with risk, compliance, and business constraints. You’ll set direction not just for individual experiences, but for the systems and workflows that enable them, influencing how design operates across the company. You’ll set the bar for interaction and systems design in complex environments, push technical craft forward through prototyping and emerging technologies (e.g., AI), and drive standards, knowledge sharing, and coherence across the product ecosystem.

Requirements

10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
Systems & strategic thinking: Simplifies complex, multi-step systems into clear, user-centered experiences; balances user needs, business goals, and constraints (technical, risk, compliance)
Experience in complex domains: Background in constraint-heavy spaces (e.g., fintech, healthcare, marketplaces, enterprise); strong grasp of edge cases and end-to-end journeys
Influence & leadership: Leads through influence across cross-functional partners and senior leadership; drives alignment in ambiguous spaces; elevates thinking and quality across the broader design organization
Executive communication: Communicates complex ideas with clarity and authority; effectively presents to senior leadership and shapes how design is understood and valued
Craft & execution: Sets a high bar for interaction design and information architecture; makes complex systems clear and usable across all scenarios; leverages prototyping, tooling, and AI to scale impact

Nice To Haves

Prototyping
Emerging technologies (e.g., AI)

Responsibilities

Establish overall business or technical strategy for user experience initiatives.
Negotiate with and influence decision-making reaching the senior executive level
Identify and resolve unique situations of substantial significance in user interface or interaction design
Allocate resources, responsibly and apply creativity to enhancing user and customer experiences across digital and physical products and services
Lead the development of user experience strategies that resonate with target audiences.
Support and mentor less-experienced roles to provide an example of innovation, excellence, and day-to-day learning
Set direction in a complex, high-stakes space: Define and evolve end-to-end strategy across disputes, limitations, and recovery; turn ambiguity into clear, actionable plans; establish principles for trust, transparency, and fairness
Design and evolve systems, not just flows: Create scalable patterns across product, support, and operations; connect fragmented journeys; raise the bar on edge cases and failure states
Lead through influence across partners: Align Product, Engineering, Risk, Legal, Ops, and Support; navigate tradeoffs across customer experience, compliance, and business impact
Lead the experience design pod: Set direction across product design, research, and content; align work across disciplines to deliver cohesive, high-quality experiences
Shape design beyond the domain: Contribute to company-wide design direction and coherence; define standards, share knowledge, and elevate quality across the organization
Transform how we design for high-risk systems: Redefine patterns and workflows for constraint-heavy experiences, improving how the organization approaches failure, recovery, and prevention at scale