Director of Product Design - Payments

ABOUT AIRWALLEX Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own. We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles https://www.airwallex.com/en-us/operating-principles to see it in full. We are seeking a visionary, hands-on Director of Product Design to define the future of Airwallex’s payments platform, the global infrastructure that powers how businesses accept payments online and in-person across currencies, methods, and markets. You will own the design strategy and execution of our core payments capabilities, including global e-commerce, point-of-sale, one-click-checkout, and risk and compliance-critical experiences. You’ll partner closely with product and engineering leaders across Payments and Risk teams, and lead a high-performing team of product designers building powerful payment experiences, APIs, and workflows. RESPONSIBILITIES PRODUCT & DESIGN STRATEGY - Define a clear, opinionated design strategy for how customers understand and use cash, high-yield, and credit accounts, and inter-account transfers as their organisation grows. - Partner with PM leaders to frame problems, prioritise opportunities, and ensure design is embedded early in product strategy, not only at execution time. - Establish moving money into, within, and out of Airwallex as a user experience foundation that other product areas (e.g. Spend management, Subscription billing, etc.) can build on top of. DESIGN LEADERSHIP & EXECUTION - Lead end-to-end experience design: Oversee research, object modeling, interaction design, research and testing, and UI design for your team’s products and features. - Raise the quality bar: Set and maintain a world-class standard for UX and UI quality in complex, data-rich screens (e.g. tables, charts, reconciliation views, approvals), ensuring work is robust and polished across desktop, mobile web, and native mobile apps. - Drive a rigorous discovery and validation practice: Ensure your teams use research, experimentation, and product analytics to understand customer behaviour. - Build a collaborative, growth-oriented design practice: Help shape the rituals, feedback practices, and shared standards that keep designers connected across regions and domains. - Integrate with design systems and platform patterns: Collaborate with the design system team to ensure your team’s experiences use and extend shared patterns. PEOPLE LEADERSHIP & ORG BUILDING - Lead and grow a high-performing design team: Manage and develop senior and staff-level product designers across our London and Singapore design studios, setting clear expectations for impact, craft, and ownership. - Create healthy, effective design-product-engineering partnerships: Develop ways of working that make collaboration with PMs and engineers productive, with design engaged from problem framing through to launch and iteration. REQUIREMENTS - Experience: 12+ years in product / UX design with significant time spent on complex, system-heavy products (e.g. B2B SaaS, developer platforms, financial or payments products). 4+ years leading designers, including managing senior designers or design managers. - Domain knowledge: Experience in online payments, risk & compliance, or adjacent financial products. - Design craft & systems thinking: Deep strengths in interaction design, information architecture, and UX for complex workflows and data-heavy products. Able to think at both the screen and system level: flows, states, permissions, object relationships, and edge cases. - Leadership & influence: Proven ability to set vision, align stakeholders, and lead multi-quarter initiatives that cut across multiple domains and teams. Comfortable debating trade-offs with senior product and engineering leaders, and advocating for customer outcomes with clarity and pragmatism. - Data- and research-informed: Familiar with partnering closely on user research and quantitative analysis to inform decisions, validate designs, and measure impact. - Communication & storytelling: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to make complex financial and technical concepts accessible to diverse audiences. - Adaptability: Thrives in a fast-paced, high-growth environment with evolving priorities and ambiguous constraints. NICE TO HAVES - Background working with API products and developer-facing experiences. - Degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field. WORKING AT AIRWALLEX - We work in a hybrid model, with teams collaborating in-office and remotely across regions. - Airwallex is a high performance, high responsibility, high impact workplace where you’ll be expected to take ownership and ship meaningful work. - If you’re excited to design the financial operating system for modern businesses and lead a pivotal part of that experience, we’d love to hear from you. APPLICANT SAFETY POLICY: FRAUD AND THIRD-PARTY RECRUITERS To protect you from recruitment scams, please be aware that Airwallex will not ask for bank details, sensitive ID numbers (i.e. passport), or any form of payment during the application or interview process. All official communication will come from an @airwallex.com h