Sr. User Experience Designer

AppFolio•Santa Barbara, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

AppFolio is more than a company. We're a community of dreamers, big thinkers, problem solvers, active listeners, and multipliers. At every opportunity, we set the pace while delivering innovation built to carry real estate into the future. One in which every experience feels effortless, yet meaningful. Where customers are empowered to take on any opportunity. We show up as one team, connected by our values to be a force for good. Because together, we have the power to create extraordinary outcomes for our customers, our communities, and ourselves. The Senior User Experience Designer will own the design of AppFolio's accounting integration surfaces -- the systems that make bank feeds, sync errors, and financial data workflows usable for the property managers and accountants who depend on them daily. This is a high-impact design role at the intersection of complex technical systems and real financial operations, where the reliability of the experience directly supports AppFolio's AI-driven accounting vision.

Requirements

Have strong systems thinking and experience designing for complex technical states, including sync errors, credential failures, and partial outages
Are comfortable working on data-dense surfaces such as tables, status indicators, and exception lists, where the design challenge is information hierarchy and signal clarity
Have a strong UX writing sensibility, particularly for error and failure states where language is as critical as the interface design
Are an effective communicator and collaborator with experience driving design decisions across engineering, product management, and external partners
Have experience measuring the impact of design work and using product analytics to inform ongoing improvements
Minimum of 5 years of experience designing complex, state-based workflows where failure states are a core part of the job; fintech is preferred, with adjacent domains including payroll, tax, insurance, healthcare revenue cycle, developer tools, identity and authentication, or data platforms also considered
A portfolio demonstrating design process, judgment, and impact in complex technical domains, including edge cases and failure states
Experience designing credential or authentication flows, error states, or data synchronization surfaces in contexts where you do not control the full stack
Experience designing data-dense interfaces where information hierarchy is the primary design challenge

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end design of AppFolio's accounting integration surfaces, including bank feeds, credential and authentication flows, sync error states, and partial-failure recovery across banking, payroll, 1099, and external partner integrations
Set the experience vision for the integration surface and drive it forward alongside product management and engineering
Design for the happy path and failure states with equal rigor, translating complex technical states into clear, actionable experiences for property managers and accountants
Collaborate with product management, engineering, and external partners to drive design decisions, facilitate critique, and surface cross-team dependencies early
Facilitate user research to validate design decisions; in open cycles, lead discovery work to identify integration opportunities not yet pursued
Contribute to and evolve AppFolio's design system, mentor junior designers, and push integration surfaces from functional to polished
Help establish how design works within a new team and set patterns that will extend across AppFolio's integration portfolio