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
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 this role by location is:
Primary Location | Pay Range:Austin, Texas: ($198,000.00 - $294,250.00 Annually)
Additional Location(s) | Pay Range:No other locations are assigned to this requisition currently.
Additional compensation for this role may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.
For the majority of employees, PayPal's balanced hybrid work model offers 3 days in the office for effective in-person collaboration and 2 days at your choice of either the PayPal office or your home workspace, ensuring that you equally have the benefits and conveniences of both locations.
Our Benefits:At PayPal, we're committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. And we can't do this without our most important asset-you. That's why we offer comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing-physical, emotional, and financial-delivering meaningful value where it matters most. We strive to create a flexible, balanced work culture with a holistic approach to benefits, including generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for you and your family, and resources to create financial security and support your mental health.
