Art Blakey led the Jazz Messengers from behind the drums. He brought musicians including Wayne Shorter and Lee Morgan into the band, encouraged them to write new music, and helped them develop into bandleaders themselves. His contribution was both the music he made and the talent he brought forward. Blue Note Records
We’re looking for a Design Manager with that combination of creative leadership and personal craft. Someone with strong design judgement, deep visual craft, and the ambition to change what businesses expect from financial software.
You’ll lead design for Mercury’s Business Banking* and Investments teams, spanning payments, accounts, and treasury. These teams help businesses move money, organize their accounts, and put idle cash to work. As the team grows, you’ll be accountable for the quality of its work, the development of its designers, and the impact of the experiences it ships.
Our ambition goes beyond making familiar banking workflows look better. We want to question how they work, identify what customers should no longer have to think about, and create something meaningfully better. That takes a leader who can recognize a promising idea, push it further, and bring a team together to make it real.
Visual design matters deeply in this role. So do interaction design, simplicity, and the judgment to make them work together. You should have a clear point of view about what excellent looks like and the hands-on ability to demonstrate it. You’ll hold a high standard through specific feedback, compelling direction, and a willingness to work alongside the team. People should feel inspired to do the best work of their careers, and supported in getting there.
*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.
In this role, you’ll:
• Raise the quality bar of the team's work. Own the visual and interaction quality of the experiences your team ships, from the structure of a complex workflow to typography, composition, spacing, and motion. Make the standard concrete through thoughtful critique and clear direction. Review the implemented experience, not just the design file.
• Challenge the status quo. Partner with Product and Engineering to shape an ambitious direction for payments, accounts, and treasury. Question inherited assumptions, including our own. Help the team distinguish genuine constraints from familiar habits, explore alternatives, and turn the strongest ideas into simpler, more useful products.
• Take ownership from problem to outcome. Identify opportunities without waiting for a brief. Create clarity when the path is ambiguous, bring the right people together, make decisions, and work through obstacles. Your responsibility continues after handoff and launch: understand what changed for customers and the business, and act when the results fall short.
• Get hands-on where your craft makes a difference. Sketch a stronger direction, prototype an interaction, or work through a difficult flow with a designer. Be able to show what better looks like, not only describe it. Use your skills selectively to advance the work and develop the designer’s judgment without taking over their ownership.
• Turn ambition into excellent work that ships on time. Make deliberate decisions about scope, sequencing, and where to spend the team’s attention. Surface tradeoffs early and resolve them with your partners. Know which details are essential to the experience and where a simpler approach will help the team move faster without compromising what matters.
• Build a healthy team with high expectations. Develop designers’ taste, confidence, and ability to deliver. Give direct, useful feedback, set clear performance expectations, and address gaps with care and conviction. Explain why the work matters and bring people together around a shared vision. Celebrate the designers behind the work and make their contributions visible across Mercury Design.
You should:
• Have strong visual and interaction design craft. Your portfolio demonstrates thoughtful typography, composition, hierarchy, and interaction design in shipped products.
• Know how to simplify complex product experiences. You can work through complicated workflows, information architecture, and product constraints to make experiences clear and intuitive.
• Have managed designers and raised the quality of their work. You can show how your coaching, feedback, and clear expectations helped designers grow and improved what reached customers. You know how to inspire ambition while holding people accountable.
• Have set a product vision and helped a team deliver it. You can connect an ambitious direction to practical decisions about scope and sequencing, with shipped work and clear customer or business impact.
• Stay close to the design work. You’re comfortable sketching, prototyping, and working through detailed design problems alongside designers, with the judgment to know when your direct contribution will help.
• Build strong partnerships with Product and Engineering. You’ve shaped priorities together, worked through competing constraints, and used clear storytelling to build alignment around design decisions.
• Think and work like an owner. You act on what’s best for customers and the business, not just what’s in the brief. You spot problems and opportunities before they’re assigned, make decisions with incomplete information, and adapt without drama when priorities shift. You stay close to implementation and outcomes, and you care more about making Mercury better than about whose idea it was.
• Build conviction without relying on authority. You can tell a clear story about where the product should go and why. You start disagreements with curiosity, make your reasoning specific, and change your mind when a better idea emerges. You help people pursue a demanding standard because they understand and believe in it.
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