Lead Product Designer

Role overview

Lead Product Designer on a leadership-track path at Allocate. You will own design initiatives end to end, coordinate across squads, partner with PMs, engineers, and stakeholders, and help raise the design quality bar while mentoring more junior designers.

Key responsibilities

• Lead design initiatives end to end: research, UX, UI, prototyping, and handoff.
• Build interactive prototypes in Figma, Magic Patterns, and/or with Claude/Cursor for code-backed prototyping when it accelerates learning.
• Validate ideas and flows with stakeholders and users; pressure-test before engineering invests.
• Coordinate design across squads (design syncs, dependency management) to keep projects moving.
• Collaborate with PMs, engineers, and stakeholders to define problems and deliver high-quality outcomes.
• Develop working knowledge of private markets and client workflows (funds, co-investments, capital calls, distributions, portfolio reporting).
• Use AI-assisted tools thoughtfully for research synthesis, exploration, and prototyping.
• Identify user- and system-level opportunities to improve usability, performance, and consistency.
• Improve how the team works via design systems, tooling, and process.
• Mentor designers (IC2 and below) through feedback, reviews, and 1:1 coaching.
• Support recruiting and begin operating as a hiring manager for junior design roles.
• Communicate design decisions clearly, tying them to user value and business outcomes.

Requirements

• 5+ years of product design experience with increasing responsibility.
• Experience leading projects and/or squads through full design cycles (discovery to delivery).
• Strong curiosity about complex financial topics and how private markets work.
• Comfortable creating interactive prototypes (ideally Figma and Magic Patterns), and willing to use Claude/Cursor for code-backed prototypes.
• Pragmatic, experiment-friendly approach with early validation and evidence-led decisions.
• Systems thinking and strong collaboration.

Nice-to-haves

• Increasing comfort mentoring designers and taking on hiring/people-management responsibilities.