Senior Director of Product Design

Summary

Join Pleo's leadership team as a seasoned Product Design Director to lead product design for a major business area. You will shape design strategy, elevate design craft, and drive outcomes through human-centered design. Collaborate closely with executive leadership and a team of designers. In this strategic and hands-on role, you'll own design transformation, delivering high-quality customer experiences and shaping team building and scaling. Over the first year, you will define a design strategy, ship major initiatives, create growth opportunities for your team, and lead design work impacting key business metrics. You will also build a UX quality strategy and mentor designers.

Requirements

• A track record of leading design work that made a measurable difference - whether by launching completely new experiences, redesigning major parts of the product, or changing how teams work
• Experience managing senior and staff designers, and have real stories of coaching them into confident leads and future design leaders
• A reputation for building high-performing teams - where people feel clear, trusted, and energised
• Strong instincts for working with product and engineering. Not just making things look good, but shaping what gets built and why
• A habit of grounding decisions in real customer insight through numbers, stories, patterns, or pain points
• Experience getting senior stakeholders on board with complex ideas - especially when the right path isn’t the obvious one
• A sharp eye for quality and a mindset for raising the bar - especially when things get fast, messy, or ambiguous

Responsibilities

• Own and drive design transformation in a critical product area, delivering high-quality experiences that help our customers thrive - and our business grow
• Shape how we build, collaborate, and scale as a design team
• Define a clear design strategy for your area and align it with partners in Product and Engineering
• Ship 1-2 major initiatives with the team with early signs of impact on adoption, monetisation, or UX quality
• Create clarity, support, and growth opportunities for your team
• Ensure design is actively shaping roadmap and prioritisation - not just reacting to it
• Coach designers to raise their craft, confidence, and ownership
• Lead design work that moves key business metrics - revenue, retention, or product engagement
• Build and scale a UX quality strategy for your area, measuring impact and adjusting as you learn more
• Mentor designers to take on bigger problems and grow their scope of impact
• Co-lead a cross-functional initiative that shapes how Pleo prioritises, collaborates, or ships value
• Deepen trusted partnerships across Product, Engineering, Brand, and beyond

Preferred Qualifications

• You’ve built tools in and around fintech - how money moves, how teams make decisions, how businesses stay compliant - and you care deeply about making that work simpler, clearer, and more human
• You’ve led design in multi-market or multi-language products, and understand what truly scales across cultures
• You have curiosity and hands-on experience with emerging tech like AI, and a drive to use it in ways that make products more powerful and human

Benefits

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
• Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office 🍜
• Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location
• We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
• For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options
• Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far ❤️‍🩹
• Access to LinkedIn Learning - acquire new skills, stay abreast of industry trends and fuel your personal and professional development continuously
• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work 👶