Design Lead

The Head of Design will lead the design direction across our client's digital products and customer journeys.

This role sits at the intersection of product design, customer experience, growth, and brand expression. The right person will create experiences that are simple, trustworthy, commercially effective, and scalable.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can think strategically, raise the quality bar, and stay close to execution, working closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Strategy, Commercial, and Operations to shape product experiences, customer journeys, and growth surfaces across the business.

What you'll do:

• Own company's design strategy and shape the end-to-end experience across mobile, web, partner channels, and internal tools, optimizing clarity, trust, usability, and conversion.
• Set the strategic direction for critical journeys across onboarding, payments, financing, property services, and lifecycle touchpoints, building trust in high-consideration financial moments.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Strategy, Commercial, and Operations to turn business goals, customer insight, and experimentation into effective experiences and growth journeys.
• Build and evolve the design system, including components, patterns, and standards that help the business scale with consistency and speed.
• Raise the quality bar through design reviews and QA, while leading, mentoring, and developing the design team and establishing high-standard collaborative rituals.

What we're looking for:

• Senior product design leadership experience on consumer-facing digital products, in one or more of the following domains: fintech, consumer finance, payments, BNPL, embedded finance, digital banking, wallets, proptech, or marketplaces.
• A portfolio of shipped products, complex journeys, and measurable business impact, especially across high-consideration flows such as onboarding, activation, checkout, or credit decisioning
• Product thinking and a broad craft range across UX, UI, interaction, and growth design, with the ability to connect design decisions directly to business outcomes.
• A track record of building and scaling design systems, reusable components, and standards across multiple product surfaces.
• Experience leading, mentoring, and growing designers, while establishing a high-quality bar for the team.

Strongly preferred:

• Experience at a high-growth regional or global consumer platform, such as Tabby, Ziina, Wio, Careem, Tamara, or similar.
• Experience in the UAE, GCC, or wider MENA market.
• Background in embedded finance, BNPL, credit, payment flexibility, wallets, or affordability-based journeys.
• Experience designing across B2C, B2B2C, and partner-led distribution models.

What success looks like

• The company's product experience is clearer, more consistent, and more scalable across surfaces.
• Customer journeys are easier to understand, more trustworthy, and more conversion-oriented.
• The design system measurably improves speed, consistency, and quality across product delivery.
• Design is a stronger partner to Product, Engineering, Marketing, Strategy, and Commercial teams.
• Design quality improves release over release, with better UX thinking, cleaner execution, and clearer alignment to business outcomes.