Head of Product Design

Tilt builds mobile-first financial products and machine learning-powered credit models designed to expand access to fair credit. The Head of Product Design will lead the product design function, manage and develop a team of designers and a researcher, shape product strategy, strengthen research and design systems, and champion user-centered design across the company.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design function: Set the vision, standards, and strategy for product design at Tilt in a manner that fits Tilt’s strategic objectives. Set the bar for craft and hold it across every surface we ship
• Operate with urgency for our users: Set ambitious timelines, but know when to afford space. We learn best from product in customers’ hands, and are comfortable with ambiguity
• Grow the team’s impact: Manage, mentor, and develop a team of 6 product designers and 1 researcher — and own hiring as we scale. Build the career paths, deliver regular feedback, and rituals that builds stronger designers and ensures top performers stay. Celebrate and showcase work at company-wide rituals, not just among the Design team
• Move design upstream: Push design into problem definition and roadmap-setting, not just execution. Partner with Product, Engineering, and other cross-functional leadership to build better operating systems
• Champion the user for the enterprise: Be the vocal, evidence-based advocate for the people who use our products. Bring research, verbatims, and influence into decisions across credit, growth, engineering, and more
• Own how we learn: Build Tilt's research practice — today getting started with our first researcher — into a durable capability that gets the team real signal on real users
• Scale the design system: Steward the Tilt Design System — from illustrations, type, color, copy, and more — as products in their own right, so a growing multi-product surface stays coherent
• Put agents to work: Hold an informed point of view on where AI genuinely improves design work, and turn it into practice rather than pilots. Own automation efforts to unleash the Design & broader delivery team on highest value work
• Partner with Creative: Work closely with Marketing's Creative team so product experience and brand expression reinforce each other — make the seam invisible between the disciplines

Requirements:

• • Depth in consumer product design: 8+ years designing and shipping consumer-facing mobile products, ideally in fintech or another domain with real complexity sitting behind a simple surface
• • Proven people leadership: 5+ years managing designers, with a track record of building teams, raising the bar on craft, and developing people into stronger designers than you found them
• • A strategic partner, not a service provider: You've operated at the leadership table — shaping roadmap and strategy alongside Product and Engineering peers, not receiving requirements from them. You're interested in the business mechanics and financial impact you'll have, in addition to our user
• • A portfolio with consequences: Work that shows craft •and• outcome. You can walk through the user problem, the decisions you made, and what changed in the business
• • Evidence-driven, but comfortable in ambiguity: You use research and data to sharpen design judgment rather than substitute for it, and you know how to get signal when there's no dedicated research team yet
• • Clear at the exec level: You can make a design argument to a CEO or a credit lead without translating it into design jargon first
• • Fluent in modern tooling: Deep in Figma, and genuinely curious about where AI belongs in a design workflow