Lead User Experience Designer

About Blackhawk Network

Today, through BHN’s single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world’s largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver these products in seamless, integrated ways. BHN’s network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints. Learn more at BHN.com.

Overview

Blackhawk Network's Global Design team is seeking a Lead UX Designer to drive user experience strategy and execution across our diverse product portfolio. This role sits at the intersection of strategic design thinking, technical implementation, and emerging technology—perfect for a designer who thrives on complexity and wants to shape the future of digital commerce, incentives, and payment experiences.

 

You'll lead design initiatives across multiple product lines including consumer-facing commerce platforms, B2B incentive solutions, and enterprise wallet products. This is an opportunity to influence product strategy while staying close to the craft of modern, AI-augmented design.

Responsibilities

Strategic Design Leadership

• Lead end-to-end UX design for 2-3 concurrent product initiatives across BHN's portfolio, from discovery through delivery
• Conduct and synthesize primary user research to inform product strategy and design decisions
• Partner directly with product management and engineering leadership to shape roadmaps and advocate for user needs
• Define and evangelize UX vision across cross-functional teams, ensuring design is positioned as a strategic partner rather than a downstream dependency
• Present design rationale and research findings to executive stakeholders with clarity and confidence

Hands-On Design Excellence

• Create high-fidelity prototypes, interaction models, and design specifications that bridge strategic thinking with technical implementation
• Contribute to and extend our design system, ensuring consistency and quality across our product portfolio
• Design for complex technical environments including modern web standards and responsive experiences
• Ensure accessibility compliance (WCAG 2.1 AA+) is embedded in every design decision, not an afterthought

Technical Fluency & AI Integration

• Collaborate effectively with engineering teams using modern development practices
• Explore and implement AI-augmented design workflows including generative UI, automated design-to-code pipelines, and LLM-assisted research synthesis
• Stay current with emerging AI/ML capabilities and identify opportunities to enhance both internal design processes and end-user experiences
• Understand technical constraints and opportunities well enough to have informed conversations about implementation tradeoffs

Team Collaboration & Mentorship

• Mentor and provide feedback to other designers on the team, fostering a culture of craft excellence and strategic thinking
• Participate in design critiques, contributing constructive perspectives that elevate the work
• Collaborate across our distributed design organization, sharing insights and patterns that benefit multiple product areas
• Contribute to design team culture through thought leadership, knowledge sharing, and process improvement

Qualifications

Required

• 12+ years of UX design experience with at least 3 years leading complex, multi-stakeholder projects
• Portfolio demonstrating end-to-end design process from research through high-fidelity delivery, with clear articulation of your role and impact
• Proven ability to conduct generative and evaluative user research and translate insights into actionable design decisions
• Experience creating or working with design systems to ensure consistency and scalability
• Comfortable working with modern web technologies and development workflows—you understand how your designs become code
• Experience designing for accessibility (WCAG standards) as a core practice, not a compliance checkbox
• Excellent communication skills with ability to tailor messaging for different audiences (executives, engineers, designers)
• Track record of shipping successful products in fast-paced, technically complex environments

Preferred

• Active engagement with AI tools and trends in the design space (ChatGPT, Midjourney, Figma AI, v0, etc.)
• Familiarity with modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue, et