Director, Experience Design

The Company
PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy.
We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers.
We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards. Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade.
Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day. We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities.
Job Summary:
This job establishes the overall strategy for user experience research, influencing key decisions at the executive level. They conduct research to gather insights into We’re looking for a design leader to define and deliver a unified payments and checkout experience across the full commerce lifecycle. You’ll establish the experience strategy and shared patterns that connect checkout, payment selection, authentication, transaction status, refunds, disputes, and recurring payments into one coherent system. Working across Product, Engineering, Risk, Compliance, and regional teams, you’ll turn complex payment, regulatory, and risk requirements into simple, trusted customer experiences. You’ll lead the evolution from fragmented and legacy flows toward a scalable platform, using experimentation and funnel insights to improve conversion and customer outcomes. You’ll also hire, grow, and lead a team of designers spanning platform and customer-facing experiences.
Job Description:
Essential Responsibilities:
Establish overall business or technical strategy for user experience initiatives.
Negotiate with and influence decision-making reaching the senior executive level
Identify and resolve unique situations of substantial significance in user interface or interaction design
Allocate resources, responsibly and apply creativity to enhancing user and customer experiences across digital and physical products and services
Lead the development of user experience strategies that resonate with target audiences.
Support and mentor less-experienced roles to provide an example of innovation, excellence, and day-to-day learning
Minimum Qualifications:
10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
2 years of experience leading others
Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:
Additional Responsibilities
Define and champion the end-to-end experience vision for payments and checkout across merchants, markets, devices, and payment methods.
Establish shared experience patterns for checkout components, payment method selection, authentication, identity and risk interventions, errors and declines, transaction status, and receipts.
Map and simplify the full commerce lifecycle, including cart, authorization, authentication, settlement, refunds, disputes, and recurring billing.
Develop a migration strategy that enables teams to move legacy experiences onto a unified system incrementally while protecting conversion and business performance.
Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Risk, Compliance, and regional teams to reconcile customer needs with regulatory requirements, fraud controls, processor and network behavior, and local payment practices.
Use experimentation, funnel analytics, customer insights, and operational data as core inputs to design strategy and decision-making.
Establish design principles, standards, and reusable patterns that reduce bespoke solutions and enable teams to launch high-quality payment experiences faster.
Drive alignment across teams and organizations, influencing partners and leaders beyond the direct reporting structure.
Communicate effectively with senior executives on tradeoffs among conversion, trust, risk, cost, customer experience, and speed.
Hire, develop, and lead a high-performing design team across platform and surface-level experiences.
Define and measure experience outcomes, including checkout completion, adoption of shared patterns, launch velocity, and reduction in customer support contacts.
Preferred Qualifications
Deep experience leading experience or product design for payments, checkout, commerce, financial services, or other complex transactional systems at scale.
Demonstrated expertise in systems thinking, platform design, and design systems, with a track record of creating reusable experiences across products and teams.
Strong understanding of payment and checkout journeys, including authorization, authentication, payment methods, transaction states, failures, refunds, disputes, and recurring payments.
Experience designing within complex regulatory, risk, fraud, identity, and technical constraints while maintaining a simple customer experience.
Proven ability to use experimentation, conversion funnels, behavioral data, and qualitative research to guide design decisions.
Track record of leading organizational change and driving adoption of shared experience standards across independently operating teams.
Experience building, coaching, and developing senior design talent and multidisciplinary design teams.
Exceptional executive communication, storytelling, and influence skills, with the ability to create alignment across Product, Engineering, Design, Risk, Compliance, and business leadership.
Ability to balance customer trust and simplicity with conversion, business performance, technical feasibility, and operational requirements.
Subsidiary:
PayPal
Travel Percent:
0
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The base pay for this role will depend on where you work and the relevant experience and expertise you bring. The expected range of pay for