Head of Design, Bitgo

• Experience leading design in financial services. Digital assets, or another domain of genuinely complex technical flows, strongly preferred
• You have built and owned a design system at scale, not just used one
• Hands-on in Figma and a role model for craft. You are shipping design work today, not describing work you shipped four years ago. You can sit in a critique and give feedback that is specific enough to act on
• Deep in UX. Strong product thinking, logical reasoning, and decisions grounded in data rather than taste alone
• You have managed designers and made them better. You care about how the team is doing, not only what it ships
• Technically literate. Comfortable with APIs, data models, and engineering trade-offs
• Direct communicator. You can hold a position with a Chief Product Officer, an engineering lead, or a client, and change your mind when the argument is better
• You want the mandate. Turning a technical, compliance-heavy platform into a design-led one is the appeal, not the obstacle

Desirable

• 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 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
• 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
• Design's standing in the company. Amplify the team's visibility, voice, and strategic impact. Represent design in strategy, roadmap, and architecture conversations, and push for the client experience when nobody else in the room will
• Upstream involvement. Join product and engineering at discovery, not at handoff. Shape long-term roadmaps with PMs so the team builds toward a direction instead of absorbing late changes
• The design system. Own the system and component library end to end: tokens, patterns, governance, contribution model, and adoption across product teams. Translate company strategy into a system flexible enough that teams ship scalable experiences rather than one-off patches
• Systems design. Our platform spans seven product areas with shared primitives — accounts, wallets, assets, entitlements, approvals. Design the system, not the screen
• The discipline. Establish UX and systems thinking as a practice the whole organization runs on, not a stage a design team owns. Product managers, engineers, and business leads should be able to frame a client problem, map the system it lives in, and evaluate a solution against real client needs. That is how we ship value to every client type we serve, in every market we operate in — rather than a set of features that work for the loudest account
• How we work. Establish the processes a small team needs to move fast without losing quality: critique, documentation, design review, and clean handoffs with engineering. Set the quality bar and hold it, including for AI-assisted work
• Technical depth. Read a technical design, understand the constraint, and decide with engineering where to compromise, where to hold, and where a broader change is worth the cost. Get into the mechanics with the team on the hard edge cases — the crypto ones and the design ones
• The face of design. Be present and known internally, and represent BitGo design externally with clients, partners, and candidates
• What success looks like:
• By six months: the design system has a clear owner, a versioned component library, and measurable adoption. Product teams stop reinventing patterns. You have shipped design work of your own that the team points to as the standard. Every designer knows what their next level requires and has work that supports getting there
• By 12 months: design is in the room early on strategy, not late on execution. Product and engineering partners frame problems in client terms without being asked. The team has grown in size and capability. At least one flagship surface has shipped with a coherent, systemized experience clients notice