Staff User Experience Designer

Sydecar•San Francisco, CA

8d•$200,000 - $250,000

About The Position

Sydecar is on a mission to transform the world of private markets by making them more accessible, transparent, and liquid through revolutionizing the creation and execution of investment vehicles. The platform simplifies and standardizes the private investing experience, handling tasks like automating banking, ensuring compliance, managing contracts, taxes, and reporting, allowing investors to focus on deals and relationships. We are seeking a Staff User Experience Designer to help redefine our product experience as we scale. This is a high-ownership, high-execution role for a design leader who moves fast, makes strong decisions, and drives work to completion while maintaining an exceptional bar for craft and customer understanding. The role involves operating as a player coach and mentor to a team of 2-3 Product Designers, while remaining deeply hands-on. The immediate focus is on hands-on design leadership and mentorship, with potential for formal people management in the future. The designer will play a central role in shaping product strategy through user research, design judgment, and partnership with Product and Engineering. The product operates in a regulated environment serving diverse customers, requiring a balance between compliance and delivering a best-in-class, intuitive experience for complex financial workflows.

Requirements

7+ years of product design experience, including at least 2 years experience as a lead/senior designer
Experience establishing or improving design processes on a team.
Exceptionally strong hands-on design skills, with a portfolio demonstrating end-to-end UX ownership and redesigns
Deep experience leading and applying user research to drive strategy and execution
Strong experience designing complex workflows, multi-step processes, or system-heavy products
Strong experience in design systems and UI libraries
Ability to balance compliance and regulatory needs with delivering a best-in-class customer experience
Data-informed, outcome-oriented designer with a bias toward execution
Comfortable operating in ambiguity and energized by early-stage environments

Nice To Haves

Experience working in regulated markets, especially fintech, capital markets, or private venture strongly preferred.
Experience with consumer and/or SMB products strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

Own and Evolve the End-to-End UX: Lead the evolution of the entire user experience for deal leads, investors, and internal operations teams.
Personally drive design on high-impact initiatives, from discovery through delivery.
Simplify complex, regulated workflows into clear, intuitive, and experiences that create trust for our customers.
Set and maintain a high bar for design quality while operating with startup speed.
Research-Led Design Leadership: Lead user research as a first-class input to product strategy and design decisions.
Partner closely with Product Managers to define problems, test assumptions, and validate solutions.
Act as a strong voice of the customer in roadmap and prioritization discussions as well as on specific initiatives.
Synthesize qualitative and quantitative insights into clear, actionable direction.
Design Systems & UI Foundations: Lead the adoption and evolution of design systems, shared UI components, and design libraries.
Partner with Engineering and Product to ensure consistent implementation across the product.
Define standards, guidelines, and best practices that enable speed without sacrificing quality.
Balance systemization with flexibility as the product evolves.
Design for Impact in a Regulated Environment: Work with SMEs to balance regulatory, compliance, and operational requirements with excellent UX.
Design systems and flows that support trust, accuracy, and clarity for investors and deal organizers.
Make confident tradeoffs when constrained, and communicate them clearly.
Use data to inform decisions and optimize for outcomes such as conversion, activation, and retention.
Support the Growth of the Design Team: Act as a coach and mentor for more junior Product Designers.
Provide direct feedback and clear creative direction to keep work moving and maintain quality.
Foster a culture of trust, collaboration, speed, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Help designers grow both their craft and product thinking.