The posting
ABOUT NOVO
Small businesses are the backbone of the US economy — nearly half of GDP and the private workforce — yet big banks don't give owners the access, assistance, or modern tools they need to grow. We started Novo to change that. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the modern entrepreneur by building the go-to banking platform for small businesses.
Novo is a fintech, not a bank. We give entrepreneurs, freelancers, and SMBs an operating system for their money: no-fee business checking, debit and credit cards, loans and funding, payments across every rail (ACH, wires, FedNow), invoicing, bill pay, expense management, and integrations with the tools they already run their business on. We've helped hundreds of thousands of businesses get powerfully simple banking, and we're just getting started.
WHY NOVO?
- A mission-driven team building for the people big banks pretend don't exist
- Real ownership: we make decisions that affect real businesses every day, and we trust people to act on that
- A flat culture where ideas win on merit — hierarchy is not authority
- Modern stack, modern tooling, and a team that takes AI seriously as part of how we work
- Competitive salary and stock options for every full-time employee
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Learning and development budget
- Offices in NYC and India, with Wednesday team lunches that rotate cuisines
THE ROLE
We're looking for a Staff Product Designer to be the highest-leverage individual contributor on our product design team. You'll own the hardest, most ambiguous design problems at Novo — the ones that cut across checking, payments, credit, and invoicing, and across web, iOS, and Android — and you'll set the bar for what great looks like for everyone else.
This is not a management role. It is a role with real authority over the quality and coherence of the product. You'll partner directly with product leads, engineering leads, data, and compliance to shape what we build, not just how it looks. You'll multiply the team's output by making the design system, the patterns, and the standards stronger than any one designer could on their own.
You'll know you're succeeding when Novo feels like one product instead of a collection of features, when a small business owner can move money, get paid, and access capital without ever having to think about how banking works underneath, and when other designers ship better work because of the foundations you built.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
Lead design on Novo's most complex problems
- Own end-to-end design for cross-surface initiatives — onboarding and account opening, money movement, lending and credit, invoicing and getting paid — from problem framing through shipped, measured outcomes
- Turn ambiguous business goals and regulatory constraints into clear product strategy, information architecture, and interaction models
- Work upstream with product and engineering leads to shape the roadmap, not just execute it
Set and raise the bar for craft
- Define what "done well" means for interaction, visual, and content design at Novo, and hold the team (and yourself) to it
- Run design critique that makes people better and work sharper
- Ship polished, accessible (WCAG-conformant), production-ready design across web and native mobile
Own the design system
- Lead the evolution of Novo's design system: tokens, components, patterns, documentation, and the process by which it grows
- Partner with engineering to keep Figma and production in lockstep, and to retire the inconsistencies that accumulate in a fast-moving product
- Make the system the default path — faster for designers and engineers to use it than to go around it
Design for a regulated product
- Work hand-in-hand with Compliance, Risk, and Legal so that disclosures, consent, KYC/KYB, and error states are designed with care rather than bolted on
- Treat trust as a design surface: security, clarity around fees and terms, and honest handling of edge cases
Use AI as part of the craft
- Fluency across the AI design stack — Figma AI, Claude/ChatGPT, Cursor or Claude Code for prototyping, generative tools for exploration — with a clear point of view on where they accelerate the work and where they don't
- Help the team build repeatable AI-assisted workflows for research synthesis, exploration, prototyping, and documentation
- Contribute design thinking to Novo's own AI-powered product experiences
Multiply the team
- Mentor senior and mid-level designers through pairing, critique, and feedback
- Write and codify the principles, patterns, and playbooks that make good design repeatable at Novo
- Be the design voice in cross-functional and leadership conversations
MUST HAVE
- 10+ years of product design experience, with at least 3 operating at a staff or lead scope — owning cross-team, cross-platform problems as an IC
- A portfolio of shipped, complex products that shows the full arc: research and problem framing, systems thinking, interaction design, visual polish, and business results
- Deep experience building and scaling design systems across web and native mobile (iOS and Android)
- Expert-level Figma, strong prototyping skills, and enough technical fluency to pair effectively with engineers and understand what's cheap versus expensive to build
- Data fluency: you read funnels, frame experiments, and use quantitative and qualitative signals to make design decisions defensible
- Experience designing in a regulated environment — fintech, financial services, healthcare, or similar — including disclosures, consent flows, and identity verification
- Hands-on AI fluency in your daily design work, with sound judgment about when it adds value and when it introduces risk
- Exceptional communication: you present clearly, give and take hard feedback well, and influence without authority
- Comfortable with ambiguity and speed, without letting quality slide
NICE TO HAVE
- Direct experience designing lending, credit, payments, or business onboarding products
- Comfort prototyping in code (React, SwiftUI, or similar)
- Experience designing agentic or AI-assisted product experiences
- Motion and brand sensibility that can bridge product and marketing design
- Experience working with distributed teams across time zones
HOW WE WORK
Novo's values shape how this role operates day to day:
- Run for the bus. When you see something that needs fixing, you fix it. You don't wait for a ticket.
- Hierarchy is not authority. The best idea wins regardless of who had it — including when it isn't yours.
- Assume best intention. Hard weeks and mistakes happen. We give grace to each other and to ourselves.
- Intellectual honesty. We own our mistakes, say so before doubling down, and lead by example.
Novo values diversity as a core tenant of the work we do and the businesses we serve. We are an equal opportunity employer, indiscriminate of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information or any other protected characteristic.
