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Head of Design, Product Design

BitGo · Palo Alto, California

Location
Palo Alto, California, United States
Level
Manager
Posted
5 days ago

About this role

BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) is the digital asset infrastructure company delivering custody, wallets, staking, trading, financing, stablecoins, and settlement services from regulated cold storage. Since 2013, BitGo has focused on accelerating the transition of the financial system to a digital asset economy. BitGo maintains a global presence and multiple regulated entities, including BitGo Bank & Trust, National Association, the first federally chartered digital asset trust bank owned by a publicly traded company. Today, BitGo serves thousands of institutions, including many of the industry's top brands, financial institutions, exchanges, and platforms, and millions of investors worldwide. For more information, visit www.bitgo.com.

This role will require being full-time onsite at our Palo Alto office to support collaborative team dynamics and innovative problem-solving.

BitGo is looking for a design leader who still designs. You will manage and mentor the design team, own the design system, and sit next to the Chief Product Officer on business strategy.

This is a player-coach role, and we mean it literally. You will carry your own design surfaces and ship them, alongside leading the team. Expect roughly 50% hands-on IC work to start, decreasing as the team scales. It will not go to zero - the person setting the craft bar should be practicing at it.

We are not a design-forward company today. We intend to become one, and we want you to lead that shift.

The team you will lead

The design team is small, senior, and self-sufficient. Each designer owns a wide vertical outright - trading, staking, DeFi vaults, earn, wallets, financing - with deep product context and strong opinions about the work. They are running at capacity, which is part of why this role carries real IC load: you will pick up the retail mobile experience and design system rather than distributing that work across a team that is already full.

What they have asked for is specific, and we are hiring against it: a leader who gets into the work early with product and engineering rather than arriving at the end, who can critique craft because they still practice it, who tells them plainly what the next level requires, and who gives the team air cover so they can do the deep work instead of patching to hit dates.

What you will own

  • Your own design work. You will own surfaces directly and ship them at the quality bar you are asking of everyone else. Discovery through spec, in Figma, in the reviews, on the hard problems.
  • The team's growth. Invest in each designer individually. Be explicit about what the next level requires and give people the work that gets them there. Feedback should be candid, specific, and about the craft. Respect the ownership designers already have - autonomy is how this team works best, and your job is to raise the ceiling, not take the pen.
  • Design's standing in the company. Amplify the team's visibility, voice, and strategic impact. Represent design in strategy, roadmap, and architecture conversations, and push for the client experience when nobody else in the room will.
  • Upstream involvement. Join product and engineering at discovery, not at handoff. Shape long-term roadmaps with PMs so the team builds toward a direction instead of absorbing late changes.
  • The design system. Own the system and component library end to end: tokens, patterns, governance, contribution model, and adoption across product teams. Translate company strategy into a system flexible enough that teams ship scalable experiences rather than one-off patches.
  • Systems design. Our platform spans seven product areas with shared primitives - accounts, wallets, assets, entitlements, approvals. Design the system, not the screen.
  • The discipline. Establish UX and systems thinking as a practice the whole organization runs on, not a stage a design team owns. Product managers, engineers, and business leads should be able to frame a client problem, map the system it lives in, and evaluate a solution against real client needs. That is how we ship value to every client type we serve, in every market we operate in - rather than a set of features that work for the loudest account.
  • How we work. Establish the processes a small team needs to move fast without losing quality: critique, documentation, design review, and clean handoffs with engineering. Set the quality bar and hold it, including for AI-assisted work.
  • Technical depth. Read a technical design, understand the constraint, and decide with engineering where to compromise, where to hold, and where a broader change is worth the cost. Get into the mechanics with the team on the hard edge cases - the crypto ones and the design ones.
  • The face of design. Be present and known internally, and represent BitGo design externally with clients, partners, and candidates.

What success looks like

By six months: the design system has a clear owner, a versioned component library, and measurable adoption. Product teams stop reinventing patterns. You have shipped design work of your own that the team points to as the standard. Every designer knows what their next level requires and has work that supports getting there.

By 12 months: design is in the room early on strategy, not late on execution. Product and engineering partners frame problems in client terms without being asked. The team has grown in size and capability. At least one flagship surface has shipped with a coherent, systemized experience clients notice.

Who you are

  • Experience leading design in financial services. Digital assets, or another domain of genuinely complex technical flows, strongly preferred.
  • You have built and owned a design system at scale, not just used one.
  • Hands-on in Figma and a role model for craft. You are shipping design work today, not describing work you shipped four years ago. You can sit in a critique and give feedback that is specific enough to act on.
  • Deep in UX. Strong product thinking, logical reasoning, and decisions grounded in data rather than taste alone.
  • You have managed designers and made them better. You care about how the team is doing, not only what it ships.
  • Technically literate. Comfortable with APIs, data models, and engineering trade-offs.
  • Direct communicator. You can hold a position with a Chief Product Officer, an engineering lead, or a client, and change your mind when the argument is better.
  • You want the mandate. Turning a technical, compliance-heavy platform into a design-led one is the appeal, not the obstacle.

Helpful, not required

  • Regulated environments: broker-dealer, trust company, bank, or qualified custodian.
  • Experience with complex permissioning, approval workflows, or multi-entity account structures.
  • Design leadership at a company that went through the same shift you would lead here.

Why Join BitGo?

Disrupting an industry takes vision, innovation, passion, technical chops, drive to deliver, collaboration, and execution. Join a team of great people who strive for excellence and personify our corporate values of ownership, craftsmanship, and open communication. We are looking for new colleagues who bring innovative ways of thinking and problem-solving, and who want risks to be part of the team that changes the world’s financial markets.

  • Competitive base salary, bonus, and stock options
  • 100% company-paid health insurance for employee, partner, and dependents
  • Up to 4% 401k company match
  • Paid parental leave, Paid vacation
  • Free commuter/parking pass
  • Free custom lunches and snacks
  • Computer equipment and workplace furniture to suit your needs
  • Great colleagues and an inspiring environment

Benefits may vary based on location.

Pay Transparency Notice:

Depending upon your leveling and location, the compensation for this role averages between $210,000 and $250,000 USD base salary. Equity, an annual performance bonus, and the benefits outlined above are also part of this role’s package.

Cryptocurrencies are the most disruptive change the financial services industry has seen in years. Join us and you'll be able to look back and say you were part of the team that transformed investing.

As published by BitGo. Applications are handled on their site.

Skills this posting mentions

MobileIntegrated Circuit DesignUser Experience Design

About BitGo

BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) is the digital asset infrastructure company providing the foundation for the digital asset economy. Founded in 2013 by technologist Mike Belshe, the company was established on the conviction that digital assets would redefine the global financial system. BitGo became the first to commercialize multi-signature wallets and later developed advanced Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) technology to set the industry standard for digital asset security. Today, the company delivers a comprehensive suite of services transforming how institutional capital is managed and deployed. From regulated custody, wallets, staking, trading, OTC services, financing, and settlement, BitGo unifies these services within a single, secure environment and enables the real-time mobilization of assets, reducing the friction and risk inherent in legacy financial rails. This infrastructure is underpinned by a global footprint of regulated entities and anchored by BitGo Bank & Trust, National Association, a federally chartered digital asset bank under the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The company's mission is to accelerate the transition of the existing financial system to a digital asset economy through a commitment to transparency, monetary freedom, and borderless, 24/7 markets. BitGo serves as the operational backbone for thousands of institutional clients, including the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges and regulated platforms. Following over a decade of technical milestones, including the launch of the Go Network and the release of Stablecoin-as-a-Service, BitGo transitioned to a public company in 2026, listing on the New York Stock Exchange. BitGo remains focused on delivering the regulated infrastructure and security necessary for global institutions to scale within a borderless, 24/7 financial system.

All 40 openings at BitGo

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Apply to BitGo with a resume written for this role.

Queue Head of Design, Product Design and I read the posting, rewrite your resume against it, draft the cover letter, and score the fit. Then you press send, or press one button and I fill in BitGo’s form for you.

  1. 01Drop your resume

    A PDF or a LinkedIn URL. About a minute, once.

  2. 02I rank the openings

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  3. 03Each one is written up

    Resume rewritten for the posting, a cover letter, a fit score. Press send, or let me fill in the form.

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Drop a resume or a LinkedIn URL. I rank the live openings against it, rewrite the resume and write a cover letter for the best of them, and fill in the employer's form when you press the button. You read, you decide what goes out.

  1. 01Drop your resume

    A PDF or a LinkedIn URL. About a minute, once.

  2. 02I rank the openings

    Every weekday morning, the live catalog scored against your history. Up to 20 worth your time, not two hundred links.

  3. 03Each one is written up

    Resume rewritten for the posting, a cover letter, a fit score. Press send, or let me fill in the form.

  • New matches ranked and written before you are up.
  • Every bullet stays inside what your history supports. Nothing invented.
  • Queued, submitted, interviewing, offer: one screen, not a spreadsheet.

500 free credits on sign-up. No card. Nothing is sent until you say so.

Listed from the job board BitGo publishes. Refolk is not the employer and does not handle their hiring. Applications go to BitGo directly.