Head of Product Design (UI Leaning)

Head of Product Design (UI-Leaning)

Location: Remote, UK-based (London-friendly but not required - occasional in-person meetups, roughly every 4-6 months)
Type: Full-time, leadership
Salary: Circa £120,000, depending on experience

About the Role

We're recruiting on behalf of a small, boutique design and development studio with a strong reputation in fintech. Their clients include major global banks and financial institutions, and their core craft is taking complex, Legacy financial platforms - trading tools, FX systems, money markets, bond platforms - and completely reinventing the UX, UI, and technical build from the ground up.

They're deliberately lean: no layers of bureaucracy, no HR department, no room for passengers. Everyone on the team, including leadership, works hands-on in the tools day to day. If you want to lead and keep designing, this is built for you.

The Role

We're looking for a Head of Product Design to lead their design team and take ownership of how the work looks, feels, and gets delivered to some of the most demanding clients in financial services. This is a backfill for a well-established, senior position with a clear track record behind it - you'll have real scope to make it your own.

This is not a pure management role. The role splits roughly across:

• Hands-on design - actively working in Figma on live client projects, not just reviewing from a distance.
• Client-facing leadership - presenting design work directly to clients, explaining decisions, and building genuine trust with stakeholders in high-stakes, regulated environments.
• Team oversight - reviewing and sense-checking the work of other designers, keeping projects on track, and helping manage scheduling, often without a dedicated project manager on a given job.
• Quality and brand control - acting as the final check on deliverables, ensuring client branding and design standards are applied consistently.
• Mentoring - supporting the growth and development of the wider design team.

What We're Looking For

Above all else, we're looking for someone who fits the ethos of the team: a genuine mentor and leader who brings positive energy day to day, and who can liaise with clients and colleagues with compassion, ease, and confidence. Technical skill matters, but how you show up for people matters just as much.

You'll ideally bring:

• Strong, current proficiency in Figma, with real experience building and maintaining design systems.
• A track record designing complex, data-heavy interfaces - dashboards, financial platforms, enterprise tools, or similar (not primarily marketing sites or simple consumer apps).
• Confidence and polish presenting to and managing relationships with clients, ideally within a regulated or high-stakes industry.
• Some experience leading, mentoring, or informally managing other designers.
• Comfort working with a high degree of autonomy and ambiguity in a small, low-process team.

Nice to have:

• Direct experience in fintech or financial services.
• Experience taking a Legacy product through a full redesign or rebuild.
• Enough development-adjacent fluency to collaborate closely with engineers on technical constraints (no coding required).

We're not fixed on years of experience - if you can genuinely operate with this level of ownership and client trust, we'd rather hear from you than screen you out on tenure.

Logistics

This role is remote, with a preference for candidates based in or near London. That said, it's not a hard requirement - we're open to flexibility for the right person who can comfortably attend team meetups roughly every 4-6 months.

*Rates depend on experience and client requirements