Staff Product Designer

Novo•New York, NY

About The Position

Novo is a fintech company dedicated to providing modern banking solutions for small businesses. We offer a comprehensive platform that includes no-fee business checking, debit and credit cards, loans, payments, invoicing, bill pay, and expense management. Our mission is to empower entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized businesses by simplifying their financial operations and providing the tools they need to grow. We are looking for a Staff Product Designer to be a key individual contributor, tackling complex and ambiguous design challenges across our product suite and platforms. This role is focused on driving the quality and coherence of our product, partnering closely with product, engineering, data, and compliance teams. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in designing complex systems, scaling design systems, and working within regulated environments. You will be instrumental in making Novo feel like a unified product and ensuring a seamless experience for our users.

Requirements

10+ years of product design experience, with at least 3 operating at a staff or lead scope — owning cross-team, cross-platform problems as an IC
A portfolio of shipped, complex products that shows the full arc: research and problem framing, systems thinking, interaction design, visual polish, and business results
Deep experience building and scaling design systems across web and native mobile (iOS and Android)
Expert-level Figma, strong prototyping skills, and enough technical fluency to pair effectively with engineers and understand what's cheap versus expensive to build
Data fluency: you read funnels, frame experiments, and use quantitative and qualitative signals to make design decisions defensible
Experience designing in a regulated environment — fintech, financial services, healthcare, or similar — including disclosures, consent flows, and identity verification
Hands-on AI fluency in your daily design work, with sound judgment about when it adds value and when it introduces risk
Exceptional communication: you present clearly, give and take hard feedback well, and influence without authority
Comfortable with ambiguity and speed, without letting quality slide

Nice To Haves

Direct experience designing lending, credit, payments, or business onboarding products
Comfort prototyping in code (React, SwiftUI, or similar)
Experience designing agentic or AI-assisted product experiences
Motion and brand sensibility that can bridge product and marketing design
Experience working with distributed teams across time zones

Responsibilities

Lead design on Novo's most complex problems
Own end-to-end design for cross-surface initiatives — onboarding and account opening, money movement, lending and credit, invoicing and getting paid — from problem framing through shipped, measured outcomes
Turn ambiguous business goals and regulatory constraints into clear product strategy, information architecture, and interaction models
Work upstream with product and engineering leads to shape the roadmap, not just execute it
Set and raise the bar for craft
Define what "done well" means for interaction, visual, and content design at Novo, and hold the team (and yourself) to it
Run design critique that makes people better and work sharper
Ship polished, accessible (WCAG-conformant), production-ready design across web and native mobile
Lead the evolution of Novo's design system: tokens, components, patterns, documentation, and the process by which it grows
Partner with engineering to keep Figma and production in lockstep, and to retire the inconsistencies that accumulate in a fast-moving product
Make the system the default path — faster for designers and engineers to use it than to go around it
Work hand-in-hand with Compliance, Risk, and Legal so that disclosures, consent, KYC/KYB, and error states are designed with care rather than bolted on
Treat trust as a design surface: security, clarity around fees and terms, and honest handling of edge cases
Use AI as part of the craft
Fluency across the AI design stack — Figma AI, Claude/ChatGPT, Cursor or Claude Code for prototyping, generative tools for exploration — with a clear point of view on where they accelerate the work and where they don't
Help the team build repeatable AI-assisted workflows for research synthesis, exploration, prototyping, and documentation
Contribute design thinking to Novo's own AI-powered product experiences
Mentor senior and mid-level designers through pairing, critique, and feedback
Write and codify the principles, patterns, and playbooks that make good design repeatable at Novo
Be the design voice in cross-functional and leadership conversations