Product Design Lead

Design Lead, Core Product - Primer

About Primer:
Primer is the unified infrastructure for global payments, providing finance and payments teams with visibility and control to reduce complexity, improve performance, and capture more revenue from a single platform. Backed by leading investors, we are building the payments layer relied upon by the world's best companies. Our culture is mission-driven, smart, and reflective, focused on building exceptional products and delivering success for our merchants.

Your Team:
You will lead a small, high-caliber design team focused on the core merchant product experience – the workspace where customers build, test, and run their payment flows. This is a player-coach role. You will still design, and you will be responsible for mentoring two to three designers, their growth, and the quality bar across your domain. Design at Primer is a strategic partner alongside Product and Engineering leads, not a downstream function.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Own the experience strategy and quality bar for your domain, making final calls on major design trade-offs.
• Lead and develop a growing team of designers, coaching through real work, running critiques, and having honest development conversations.
• Dedicate roughly half your time to your own design work on the hardest or highest-leverage problems.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leads as an equal voice on strategy, shaping what gets built and why.
• Extend the design system by adding patterns and components.
• Lead research to uncover non-obvious problems and translate findings into direction.
• Unblock engineering on complex integration questions, finding solutions that protect the user experience.
• Build practices, critique standards, and handoff processes to enable a small team to move fast without sacrificing quality.

What We're Looking For:

• A strong portfolio of shipped product design on complex, systems-heavy products (SaaS, fintech, infrastructure, or developer-facing work is a close fit).
• Experience leading designers, formally or informally, raising quality through others.
• Deep craft expertise across interaction, visual design, and information architecture.
• A history of owning a domain end-to-end, from ambiguous problem to shipped, measured outcome.
• The judgment to know when to go deep and when to move, and the autonomy to run an area without close management.

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with payments, financial services, or another regulated, high-stakes domain.
• Experience building or extending a design system in production.

You May Not Like It Here If:

• You want to step out of design tools entirely to manage; you will still be designing.
• You require extensive hand-holding; high autonomy means low hand-holding.
• You prefer a traditional office setting; we are remote-first.
• You are not comfortable with shifting context and navigating ambiguity.

Interview Process:
Initial intro call with a Talent Partner, interview with the Hiring Manager, Challenge Stage, and a final values-alignment interview.

Culture & Benefits:
We foster a culture where people can do their best work and enjoy it, valuing mission-driven, smart, and reflective individuals. We are remote-first and globally distributed, investing in relationships through great remote practices and thoughtfully designed in-person time (workations, retreats, co-working access). The work is challenging but supported by collaborative structures and a great team.

Benefits:

• Fully remote and globally distributed.
• Competitive share options.
• Uncapped holiday (minimum 25 days).
• Co-working space access.
• Workations & Company Retreat.
• The best equipment for your role.
• £500 towards home office setup.
• Generous learning budget.
• Private Medical Insurance.
• Additional perks and benefits (location-dependent).