Senior Director of Product Design

Intro

At Pleo, we’re on a mission to revolutionise the way businesses manage company spending. No more outdated processes, clunky spreadsheets, or frustrating delays - we believe spend management should be seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike. We’re creating tools that promote autonomy, foster trust, and let businesses focus on what truly matters.

Our culture is built on transparency, collaboration, and a deep commitment to innovation – which is reflected in our spending solution. At Pleo, you’ll join a passionate team shaping the future of work, all while having some fun along the way.

About the role

We’re looking for seasoned Product Design Directors to join our leadership team and help us scale design impact across Pleo. In this role, you’ll lead product design for a major area of our business - shaping strategy, elevating craft, and driving outcomes through exceptional, human-centered design.

Great experience is at the heart of that mission. Not just how things look, but how they work. How they guide, bring clarity, empower, and delight. That’s where you come in.

You’ll work closely with executive leadership, partner deeply across disciplines, and grow a team of thoughtful designers who care about doing great work together. This is a strategic and hands-on role for a design leader who thrives in complexity, moves with clarity, and believes that simplicity is earned.

What you will be doing

You’ll own and drive design transformation in a critical product area, delivering high-quality experiences that help our customers thrive - and our business grow. At the same time, you’ll shape how we build, collaborate, and scale as a design team.

In the first 6 months, we imagine you will:

• Define a clear design strategy for your area and align it with partners in Product and Engineering
• Ship 1-2 major initiatives with the team with early signs of impact on adoption, monetisation, or UX quality
• Create clarity, support, and growth opportunities for your team
• Ensure design is actively shaping roadmap and prioritisation - not just reacting to it
• Coach designers to raise their craft, confidence, and ownership.

By 12 months, you’ll likely:

• Lead design work that moves key business metrics - revenue, retention, or product engagement
• Build and scale a UX quality strategy for your area, measuring impact and adjusting as you learn more
• Mentor designers to take on bigger problems and grow their scope of impact
• Co-lead a cross-functional initiative that shapes how Pleo prioritises, collaborates, or ships value
• Deepen trusted partnerships across Product, Engineering, Brand, and beyond

What you bring

• A track record of leading design work that made a measurable difference - whether by launching completely new experiences, redesigning major parts of the product, or changing how teams work
• Experience managing senior and staff designers, and have real stories of coaching them into confident leads and future design leaders
• A reputation for building high-performing teams - where people feel clear, trusted, and energised
• Strong instincts for working with product and engineering. Not just making things look good, but shaping what gets built and why
• A habit of grounding decisions in real customer insight through numbers, stories, patterns, or pain points
• Experience getting senior stakeholders on board with complex ideas - especially when the right path isn’t the obvious one
• A sharp eye for quality and a mindset for raising the bar - especially when things get fast, messy, or ambiguous

Extra bonus points if

• You’ve built tools in and around fintech - how money moves, how teams make decisions, how businesses stay compliant - and you care deeply about making that work simpler, clearer, and more human
• You’ve led design in multi-market or multi-language products, and understand what truly scales across cultures
• You have curiosity and hands-on experience with emerging tech like AI, and a drive to use it in ways that make products more powerful and human

Who you’ll be working with and reporting to

You’ll report to our VP of Design and work closely with senior leaders across Product, Engineering, and Brand. You’ll directly manage a team of 5–10 product designers, including Staff-level ICs, and collaborate with other Design Directors to shape the future of our practice.

We’re a tight-knit design org that values deep thinking, clear storytelling, and building with care. We show up for each other, we ship with intent, and we believe that great desig