Job Description

Design at Stripe

We believe there are too many barriers to doing business on the internet, and that opportunities are not equally distributed throughout the world. We also think building and growing a business online is a problem rooted in code, language, and design—not finance.

Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet and expand economic access globally. We’re designing tools and infrastructure to help our users start, run, and scale an online business from anywhere in the world. That’s where you come in: we’re looking for a diverse set of designers of many disciplines, skills, backgrounds, and specialties to join our small (but growing!) Design team in Seattle.

The Design team works across most projects at Stripe—from our brand voice and websites to events, web and mobile products, and even printed publications. And since Stripe’s main audience is other people who build products, we agonize over and take pride in crafting user-friendly and user-focused experiences.

About the Product Design team and the role

Stripe is looking for experienced product design leaders who can take charge of our mission to build world-class design teams and practices from the ground up in our growing Seattle office. Stripe was originally headquartered in San Francisco, CA, but we have sizeable engineering hubs in Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We’re now starting to build design teams in Seattle and are looking for leaders who will help us set the standard for global product design in that office. We go to extraordinary lengths to produce first-rate work, and you will get to both deploy your hard-earned experience and build your skills in an organization where your area of expertise is highly valued.

We’re about 40 people total in the Design Org, and we’re divided into teams: Communication & Brand Design, Research, Design Operations, and, of course, Product Design.

The Product Design team is responsible for the design systems that underpin all our products, as well as the specific screens and workflows that make up a product’s user experience. Our products include the Stripe Dashboard on web and mobile, which users rely on to run their business, as well as internal tools that other Stripes use to help our customers and protect them against fraud or malicious actors. Other products we work on include Atlas, Sigma, Radar, and our external docs, used primarily by developers when integrating Stripe APIs. However, boundaries between teams are permeable, so you can certainly expect to collaborate with other designers and managers on a broad set of design challenges that don’t fall neatly into the Product Design category.

You will:

• Be the first designer and the first manager on the Design team in Seattle
• Hire and manage a team of designers working on Stripe’s core product experiences
• Partner closely with Design Operations to manage resourcing of projects
• Collaborate with Design and Stripe leadership to determine design direction
• Inspire, motivate, and lead senior and junior designers to do the best work of their career
• Work closely with our product management and product engineering teams to deliver beautiful, thoughtful, and effective work that has a real impact on our users’ business
• Report to the Head of Product Design

You may be fit for this role if:

Note: It’s not expected that any single candidate would have expertise across all of these areas—we’re looking for candidates that are particularly strong in at least one area, and have some interest and capabilities in the others.

• You’ve managed a team of product designers before and have 4+ years of people management experience
• You have experience recruiting in Seattle
• You have experience methodically developing designers’ skills and careers
• You excel at motivating and inspiring people to do their best work
• You are relentlessly customer-focused
• You excel at both written and spoken communication
• Your best work is done in a highly collaborative way
• You can find a meaningful balance between optimizing for speed, quality, and doing risky, but interesting work

You should include these in your application:

• Your LinkedIn profile or resume
• A link to your portfolio (even if it consists of or includes work done by your team)