Design Director

Company Description

Wise is a global technology company, building the best way to move and manage the world’s money.
Min fees. Max ease. Full speed.

Whether people and businesses are sending money to another country, spending abroad, or making and receiving international payments, Wise is on a mission to make their lives easier and save them money.

As part of our team, you will be helping us create an entirely new network for the world's money.
For everyone, everywhere.

More about our mission and what we offer.

Job Description

How do you make sending £500k feel as safe as sending £50? How do you build the trust it takes for a business to run its payroll through you, quarter after quarter, without a second thought? How do you take our fastest growing and most valuable customer group and turn hesitation into confidence, one predictable, well handled transfer at a time?

These are some of the challenges a Design Director will get to work on as part of Wise's global mission to build an open, fair and human financial system. High Volume customers are a smaller portion of our overall base, but a significant contribution to our business, and growing fast. We haven't yet designed and built tools specific to this audience. Their needs are genuinely different, both as individual customers and from a regulatory and technological point of view. Right now we're failing to convert and retain far too many of them. This role exists to fix that.

Your mission

You'll lead designers, content designers and researchers working across the cross-functional teams that make up High Volume at Wise. Our personal and business customers move large, often life-defining amounts of money through us: property purchases, payroll, treasury operations, inheritance. We need to earn more of their trust, so they bring a wider share of their financial activity to Wise. 

In this role, you'll own the vision and strategy for design across High Volume, and direct your team to remove the friction, unpredictability and lack of premium servicing that's holding back activation and retention. Many of these customers also need to send hundreds of payments at once, for payroll, suppliers or treasury operations, and today that's still a manual, clunky process. You'll help automate and simplify how large volumes of transactions get sent, so scale becomes an advantage rather than a burden. 

This is a genuinely hands-on role: expect to be personally in the weeds on a handful of projects each quarter, not just directing from above. You'll build the systems, servicing experiences and financial products that turn Wise into the primary financial partner for our most valuable customers, at scale.
 

Here's how you'll be contributing

• Partnering with your Product and Engineering leadership partners to provide unified leadership for High Volume, setting the vision, defining strategy and leading your teams to deliver it

• Owning the design strategy for High Volume, shaping the design agenda across personal and business segments, and defining what great looks like across every surface

• Staying properly hands-on: each quarter you'll pick up a small number of projects yourself, working the problem directly rather than reviewing it from the sidelines, and using that work to set the creative and craft standard for the team

• Leading, mentoring and helping to develop all designers in the team, across product design, content design and research, accountable for their performance, growth and the quality of their work

• Proactively integrating AI into the team's design workflow and operational practices, identifying where it accelerates craft, reduces friction and creates new possibilities

• Creating vision with substance that influences the High Volume roadmap and shapes perspectives at the most senior levels of the business

• Working with Design Directors from other squads to create a single, seamless experience for customers across the Wise product

• Evangelising High Volume's design strategy across the tribe and wider business, connecting great design decisions to business outcomes and company mission

This role will give you the opportunity to

• Build and lead a talented, multi-disciplinary design team, and be the best, most hands-on leader they've ever had

• Stay deep in the craft, quarter after quarter, on a genuinely hard problem: making our largest, highest-stakes transactions feel simple, predictable and safe.

• Shape entirely new product areas for Wise, from early exploration through to launch

• Define what excellent service and premium experience looks like for our most valuable customers, and elevate your team to deliver it

• Shape how AI changes the way a world-class design team works, not as an experiment, but as a core part of how the team operates

• Set the standard for quality, creativity and accountability in one of Wise's highest-impact areas

• Be part of a positive change in the world. We're fixing a broken, greedy system, and putting people and businesses in control of their money

Additional Information

For everyone, everywhere. We're people building money without borders  — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive.

We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.
Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.

If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs.

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