Head of Design, Product Design
Player-coach design leader at BitGo, a crypto/digital-asset infrastructure company, working fully onsite in Palo Alto: roughly half hands-on product design in Figma (retail mobile, design system) and half managing/mentoring a small senior team, owning the design system, and elevating design's role in product strategy.
- Compensation
- $210K–$250K / yr
- Location
- Palo Alto, California, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Design
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Experience leading design in financial services
- Has built and owned a design system at scale, not just used one
- Hands-on in Figma and actively shipping design work today
- Deep UX skills, strong product thinking, decisions grounded in data
- Experience managing designers and developing them
- Technically literate: comfortable with APIs, data models, and engineering trade-offs
- Direct communicator who can hold a position with executives and clients
- Full-time onsite at the Palo Alto office
Nice to have
- Experience with digital assets or another domain of genuinely complex technical flows
- Experience in regulated environments: broker-dealer, trust company, bank, or qualified custodian
- Experience with complex permissioning, approval workflows, or multi-entity account structures
- Design leadership at a company that went through a similar design-maturity shift
Full description
BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) is the digital asset infrastructure company delivering custody, wallets, staking, trading, financing, stablecoins, and settlement services from regulated cold storage. Since 2013, BitGo has focused on accelerating the transition of the financial system to a digital asset economy. BitGo maintains a global presence and multiple regulated entities, including BitGo Bank & Trust, National Association, the first federally chartered digital asset trust bank owned by a publicly traded company. Today, BitGo serves thousands of institutions, including many of the industry's top brands, financial institutions, exchanges, and platforms, and millions of investors worldwide. For more information, visit .
This role will require being full-time onsite at our Palo Alto office to support collaborative team dynamics and innovative problem-solving.
BitGo is looking for a design leader who still designs. You will manage and mentor the design team, own the design system, and sit next to the Chief Product Officer on business strategy.
This is a player-coach role, and we mean it literally. You will carry your own design surfaces and ship them, alongside leading the team. Expect roughly 50% hands-on IC work to start, decreasing as the team scales. It will not go to zero — the person setting the craft bar should be practicing at it.
We are not a design-forward company today. We intend to become one, and we want you to lead that shift.
The team you will lead
The design team is small, senior, and self-sufficient. Each designer owns a wide vertical outright — trading, staking, DeFi vaults, earn, wallets, financing — with deep product context and strong opinions about the work. They are running at capacity, which is part of why this role carries real IC load: you will pick up the retail mobile experience and design system rather than distributing that work across a team that is already full.
What they have asked for is specific, and we are hiring against it: a leader who gets into the work early with product and engineering rather than arriving at the end, who can critique craft because they still practice it, who tells them plainly what the next level requires, and who gives the team air cover so they can do the deep work instead of patching to hit dates.
What you will own
- Your own design work. You will own surfaces directly and ship them at the quality bar you are asking of everyone else. Discovery through spec, in Figma, in the reviews, on the hard problems.
- The team's growth. Invest in each designer individually. Be explicit about what the next level requires and give people the work that gets them there. Feedback should be candid, specific, and about the craft. Respect the ownership designers already have — autonomy is how this team works best, and your job is to raise the ceiling, not take the pen.