Director of Product Design

About the Role Airwallex is seeking a visionary, hands-on Director of Product Design to shape the future of its 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 for core payments capabilities (global e-commerce, point-of-sale, one-click checkout, and risk and compliance‑critical experiences) and lead a high-performing team of designers building payment experiences, APIs, and workflows. You’ll partner with product and engineering leaders across Payments and Risk to embed design from problem framing through launch and iteration. What You'll Do

• 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-heavy 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. What We're Looking For
• 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 Have
• Background working with API products and developer-facing experiences.
• Degree in Design, HCI, Computer Science, or a related field.