Senior Product Designer, Identity

About Upstart

Upstart is the leading AI lending marketplace partnering with banks and credit unions to expand access to affordable credit. By leveraging Upstart's AI marketplace, Upstart-powered banks and credit unions can have higher approval rates and lower loss rates across races, ages, and genders, while simultaneously delivering the exceptional digital-first lending experience their customers demand. More than 80% of borrowers are approved instantly, with zero documentation to upload.

Upstart is a digital-first company, which means that most Upstarters live and work anywhere in the United States. However, we also have offices in San Mateo, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.

Most Upstarters join us because they connect with our mission of enabling access to effortless credit based on true risk. If you are energized by the impact you can make at Upstart, we’d love to hear from you!

The Team

Upstart’s Identity Platform and Experiences team is a multidisciplinary group responsible for designing, building, and maintaining a secure, scalable, and user-friendly identity and access management (IAM) ecosystem for our customers and lending partners. Our mission is to seamlessly connect users across products and services while ensuring top-tier security, compliance, and usability.

As the Senior Product Designer, Identity at Upstart, you will work alongside product managers, engineers, and security specialists to define strategy, lead user research, and shape frictionless identity experiences across our platform. You’ll focus on reducing friction in authentication, registration, and account recovery flows—while maintaining a high bar for security, transparency, and user control. You’ll have a major impact on how users interact with Upstart’s products by crafting seamless identity interactions that feel invisible, trustworthy, and empowering.

 

Position Location - This role is available in the following locations: Remote

Time Zone Requirements - This team operates on the East/West Coast time zones.

Travel Requirements - As a digital first company, the majority of your work can be accomplished remotely. The majority of our employees can live and work anywhere in the U.S but are encouraged to to still spend high quality time in-person collaborating via regular onsites. The in-person sessions’ cadence varies depending on the team and role; most teams meet once or twice per quarter for 2-4 consecutive days at a time.

 

How you’ll make an impact:

• Create user journeys, wireframes, prototypes, and polished mockups that shape the identity experiences for authentication, account creation, consent management, and access recovery.
• Lead research and usability studies to understand customer behavior, pain points, and expectations around login, multi-factor authentication, and account management.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to define identity experiences that reduce friction and boost conversion, while balancing strong security and user trust.
• Design accessible, inclusive, and scalable solutions across both internal tools and customer-facing experiences, keeping regulatory and compliance needs in mind.
• Build and maintain design artifacts (user flows, personas, interaction specs) that align identity experience strategy across the platform.
• Use quantitative and qualitative data to validate design decisions and iterate on experiences that improve user confidence and platform adoption.
• Contribute to a unified design system that supports consistent and secure identity patterns across all Upstart products.

 

What we’re looking for: 

• Minimum requirements:
  • 7+ years of experience designing customer-facing digital products, with a focus on secure user flows or identity-related features (e.g. login, registration, authentication).
  • Strong portfolio demonstrating end-to-end design thinking with attention to both user needs and security requirements.
    Skilled with Figma and design research tools like Usertesting, Maze, or Lookback.
  • Experience balancing usability and privacy, with a passion for simplifying complex or sensitive user flows.
  • Confident communicator and collaborator, comfortable sharing designs, receiving feedback, and partnering across disciplines including security, compliance, and engineering.
• Preferred qualifications:
  • Experience designing for identity systems or IAM platforms (e.g., SSO, OAuth, multi-factor authentication, account recovery).
  • Familiarity with identity platforms (Auth0, O