Senior Vice President, Product Designer

BNY Mellon•New York, NY

4h•Hybrid

About The Position

We're seeking a future team member for the role of Senior Vice President, Product Designer, Enterprise Custody Services to join our team. This role is located in New York, NY. Custody operations is one of the most complex operational environments in global finance, involving hundreds of applications and thousands of people. The team is focused on structurally redesigning how it all works, not incrementally. This team is building experience design from the ground up for one of BNY's largest platforms, defining the model and allowing the person in this role real influence over how design operates. AI tools are integrated into the daily practice for research synthesis, prototyping, workflow analysis, and design system infrastructure, and designers are expected to work this way. Design decisions are grounded in evidence, leading a cultural shift away from inherited opinions. This is a hybrid role, functioning as a senior individual contributor with direct influence on a small design team. The individual will mentor and guide three designers, set the quality bar and strategic direction, and work as a peer to product owners and engineering leadership, leading through the work rather than managing administratively. The role is approximately 80% strategic and research-focused, and 20% hands-on design. Prior domain expertise in financial services is less critical than the ability to learn fast, ask the right questions, and apply rigorous design thinking to complex problems.

Requirements

10–12 years of experience in product or experience design, with significant depth in service design: mapping end-to-end workflows, creating service blueprints, designing across channels and touchpoints
Demonstrated experience leveraging user research methods (contextual inquiry, usability testing, research synthesis) to ground design decisions in evidence
Experience shaping persona frameworks or user segmentation models for complex, multi-role operational environments
Systems-level thinking: you see the whole experience (the workflow, the workaround, the handoff, the failure mode), not just the interface
Proven ability to influence product and engineering decisions through design evidence, not just design output
Experience working in enterprise, regulated, or high-stakes operational environments. You're comfortable with complexity, compliance constraints, and organizational politics
Strong design craft alongside strategic thinking. You can zoom in on an interaction pattern and zoom out to a platform strategy in the same conversation

Nice To Haves

You've incorporated AI-assisted tools into how you design, research, and prototype, not as a curiosity, but as a working method
Experience designing for AI-augmented workflows: confidence indicators, human-in-the-loop decision patterns, explainable AI outputs
Experience with design system governance across a fragmented platform
You've done service design in environments where nobody called it that. You mapped the workflows, identified the offline processes, and designed the interventions that eliminated them
You understand that the biggest design opportunities in enterprise aren't on the screen. They're in the operations, the handoffs, and the assumptions no one has questioned yet

Responsibilities

Contribute to a persona framework for a 100+ application platform.
Map and redesign end-to-end operational workflows.
Bring user research best practices to the platform design team.
Drive platform experience coherence.
Design for human-AI collaboration.
Mentor the design team and raise the bar.
Support design strategy communication to leadership.

Benefits

Highly competitive compensation
Benefits
Wellbeing programs
Flexible global resources and tools for your life’s journey
Focus on your health
Foster your personal resilience
Reach your financial goals
Generous paid leaves, including paid volunteer time
401(k) plan
Company-sponsored medical plan
Company-sponsored dental plan
Company-sponsored vision plan
Basic life insurance plans for the employee and the employee’s eligible dependents
Various paid time off benefits, such as vacation and sick time