Senior Design Director, Investing and Design Systems

Palo Alto, CA, United States

Wealthfront is looking for a Design Director to support two key product areas: Investing and Design Systems. Reporting directly to the VP of Design, this role is ideal for the design leader who enjoys working across strategy, vision, team, and operations. This is for someone who is excited about having impact through the scope and quality of decisions they make—not a manager who expects to have impact through the number of people they manage.

Success in this role will require strong communication skills, strategic thinking, vision facilitation, a high bar for craft, and executional excellence. Building great financial products requires digging diligently into the details and going deep to untangle complex problems. We’re seeking a design leader who cares deeply about all phases of product development—from spark to shipped pixels.

A passion for investing or experience building consumer financial technology products is highly desirable. Growing and managing your wealth is fundamental to being able to build the life you want with the people who matter most. This is a unique opportunity to be at the center of charting the next generation of technology innovation in investing products. If this gets you excited, we want to hear from you!

Design at Wealthfront

Designers at Wealthfront are innovative, creative, strategic, and detail-oriented. We transform complex technology and concepts into clear, simple, and actionable experiences. It takes skill to make financial products appear simple. Simplicity is what empowers our clients to build long-term wealth on their own terms.

Designers at Wealthfront define problems, new opportunities and solutions. We use data, insights, and behavioral psychology. We understand and consult on our technology. We connect everything we do to our clients and our business. We actively collaborate with engineers, product managers, researchers, data scientists, legal, and compliance. We’re making big bets. Innovation is encouraged. We embrace learning. As such, we care much more about the magnitude of success versus percentage of times we are successful.

At Wealthfront, Design is an equal partner to Engineering and Product. It plays an important role in the executive staff that collectively makes all critical strategic decisions. As a leader of the organization, your role will be to model this, develop these skills in your design teams, and contribute to the company-level design organization as a member of the design leadership team.

We’re a remote-first team and open to candidates in the US.

Key responsibilities

Investing

• Helping define the next set of innovative, best-in-class products for Investing through structured guidance, facilitating strategy and visioning workshops, etc.

• Product initiatives include our Automated Index Investing Account, our Stock Investing Account, Automated Bond Ladders, and more.

Design Systems

• Defining quality for design at Wealthfront by ensuring our Design System is principled, elegant, and impactful.

• Product initiatives include key components, product and content design patterns, accessibility, tooling, etc. to uplevel and improve efficiency for design and engineering, creating consistent, high quality, and performant experiences for our clients.

Overall

• Partnering with pm, eng, research, data science, legal, and compliance leads to identify, prioritize, and ship high-impact opportunities across Investing and Design Systems teams.

• Driving company impact through supporting senior product and content designers: staffing, hiring, guiding the work, growing their skills, facilitating career development, cultivating excellent performance, and building an inclusive culture.

• Helping us innovate and scale as a company by partnering with leaders across Wealthfront. Identify and pursue impactful ideas on everything from what we build to how we work, such that we are able to learn as quickly and “lean-ly” as possible

Skills and experience 4+ years of design management experience in a software company with design embedded as part of cross-functional product development teams

10+ years of product design experience in a consumer software company

You know when and how to get into the details to drive high-quality decisions

You’re an exceptional product thinker who understands the business

You have a proven track record setting a vision for great customer experiences, inspiring others to get behind a vision, translating a vision into a prioritized roadmap, and ensuring your team ships high quality experiences to bring the team’s vision to customers

Your have strong communication, facilitation, and interpersonal skills

You’ve helped your teams grow in their creative practice by teaching them how to effectively use tools such as user experience methods, innovation, ideation, storytelling, prototyping, design frameworks, concept visualization, problem-framing skills and design principles

You’ve hired and grown a diverse team

You’ve developed a respectful, inclusive culture where debate is welcomed

You’ve managed performance across a spectrum of abilities and contexts

You are naturally curious and are deeply interested in fintech

Bonus: experience building modern fintech products

Mindset that excels at Wealthfront Approaching problems with curiosity and intellectual rigor

Taking a learning-based approach: leveraging research, data, and experimentation to build confidence around decisions and assumptions

Critically evaluating customer and business trade-offs

Transforming complexity or ambiguity into clarity

Taking a craft-led management mindset

Driving alignment across teams and stakeholders

Putting the company and the team first

Going above and beyond to make the people around you successful

Being enterprising and self-driven: moving with urgency, being solutions-oriented

Being passionate our clients and our business

Being excited to learn and grow with the company

Estimated annual salary: ~ $295,000 USD plus equity and discretionary bonus

Benefits include medical, vision, dental, 401K plan, generous time off, parental leave, wellness reimbursements, professional development, employee investing discount, and more !

About Wealthfront

Wealthfront started with the ambition to transform the investment advisory business, with the goal to unlock access to high quality investment advice for millions who were underserved by the traditional institutions. We built one of the first automated investment products that allows you to invest in a personalized portfolio of thousands of companies in seconds for a remarkably low fee. We then expanded. We now work with partner banks to offer exceptional banking features through a Wealthfront Brokerage Cash Account, which makes it remarkably easy for people to automate their finances end-to-end and eliminated the hassle of money management, all of which resulted in attracting more than $50 billion of our client’s hard earned money, pioneering the robo-advisor category and transforming the broader industry. And yet, we have a long way to go to achieve our mission to build a financial system that favors people, not institutions.

Wealthfront’s vision is to make it delightfully easy to build long-term wealth on your own terms. This vision is more relevant than ever because millions more people are getting into the market early and investing their hard earned savings in a handful of stocks. While this is a great way to start, it is inconsistent with building long-term wealth. We want to empower young investors to expand their horizon, and easily explore and execute on a wider range of investing strategies, make informed investment decisions that are consistent with their values and beliefs while also making it effortless to grow and compound their savings exponentially in a way that’s transformational to their lives and their long-term future.

For more information please visit www.wealthfront.com .

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Please review our candidate privacy notice .

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