Product Design Lead

Primer is the unified infrastructure for global payments. We give finance and payments teams the visibility and control to reduce complexity, improve performance, and capture more revenue - all from a single platform.

Primer is the payments infrastructure that lets merchants connect and orchestrate every payment service they use through a single platform, without being locked to any one processor. Design owns how that complexity ends up feeling simple to the people who actually use it.

You will lead a small design team behind the core merchant product experience: the workspace where customers build, test and run their payment flows. This is a player-coach role. You will still design, and you will be responsible for two to three designers, their work, their growth, and the quality bar across the area.

The surface is genuinely hard. Payment flows are conditional, stateful and unforgiving, and the people using them range from an engineer wiring up an integration to an operations team reacting to a live incident. Getting it right means real depth in the problem, not polished screens on top of it.

Design here is small and high-calibre by choice. You sit as an equal alongside Product and Engineering leads, not downstream of them. The team is remote-first and globally distributed, and that will not change.

What will you be doing?

• Own the experience strategy and quality bar for your domain. You set what good looks like and you make the final call on the major design trade-offs.
• Lead and develop a growing team of designers. Coach through real work, run critique that raises the bar, and have honest development conversations rather than comfortable ones.
• Stay in the tools. Roughly half your time is your own design work on the hardest or highest-leverage problems, not reviewing other people's.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leads as an equal voice on strategy for the area. You shape what gets built and why, not only how it looks.
• Extend the design system wherever your area exposes a gap, adding patterns and components the rest of design reuses.
• Lead the research that uncovers the non-obvious problems across the different people who depend on the product, then turn it into direction.
• Unblock engineering on the messy questions where the ideal design meets a real constraint, and find the answer that protects the experience.
• Build the practices, critique, file standards and handoff that let a small team move fast without dropping quality.

What we're looking for

• A strong portfolio of shipped product design on complex, systems-heavy products. SaaS, fintech, infrastructure or developer-facing work is the closest fit.
• Experience leading designers, formally or as the senior person others looked to. You know how to raise quality through other people, not only your own hands.
• Real craft depth across interaction, visual and information architecture. You set the standard, you do not just meet it.
• A history of owning a domain end to end, from ambiguous problem to shipped, measured outcome.
• The judgment to know when to go deep and when to move, and the autonomy to run an area without close management.

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with payments, financial services or another regulated, high-stakes domain.
• Experience building or extending a design system in production.

You may not like it here if

• You want to step out of the tools entirely and manage, this is not it. You will still be designing, and the team is too small to hide in.
• High autonomy means low hand-holding. Nobody hands you a defined roadmap or tells you how to run your area. You set the direction and you own the result.
• The problem space is dense and unglamorous. You will spend real time understanding how payments actually work, not just the visible interface.
• Remote-first means written, asynchronous and self-directed. If you need an office to do your best work, you will struggle here.

A typical interview process

• An initial intro call with a Talent Partner
• An interview with the Hiring Manager
• Challenge Stage - Contextualised to the role
• A final, values-alignment interview

What’s the culture like at Primer?

We’re building a culture where people can come and do their best work and enjoy it. We want our people to be proud of the impact that they have at Primer, and of the work that they are doing. You will be working with a team of people who are mission-driven, smart, and reflective, and who are invested in building exceptional products and delivering success for our merchants (and we also know how to have fun along the way).

We work remotely. We believe that building a successful, profitable company goes beyond proximity. We invest in our relationships with each other through great remote working practices and thoughtfully designed face-to-face time together. Our heads-together time comes in the form of workations, our annual company retreat, and co-working space access worldwide.

Finally, let’s go ahead and say it. The work that we do is challenging. Scaleups are a challenge, building category defining products is a challenge. You should be prepared for a challenge at Primer. But, there’s a big difference between a challenge and a struggle. The key difference is that the right challenge comes with the right support structures, an acceptance that not everything always goes to plan, a collaborative environment, and a great team around you. It’s never a challenge that you will face alone.

Our benefits

• We are fully remote and globally distributed; and have been since day one
• Competitive share options
• Uncapped holiday, with 25 days minimum to be taken
• Co-working space access
• Workations & Company Retreat
• The best equipment for your role
• £500 towards your home office setup
• Generous learning budget
• Private Medical Insurance
• A broad set of additional perks and benefits (depending on location)

Don’t meet every single requirement?

At Primer, we’re dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply. You may be the right candidate for this or other roles. Primer is committed to the equal treatment of all current and prospective employees, regardless of background or beliefs. Primer adopts a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination. We are committed to providing equal opportunities to all current and prospective employees regardless of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, or marriage and civil partnership.