Senior Product Designer

Kikoff: A FinTech Unicorn Powering Financial Progress with AI
At Kikoff, our mission is to provide radically affordable financial tools to help consumers achieve financial security. We're a profitable, high growth FinTech unicorn serving millions of people, many of whom are building credit or navigating life paycheck to paycheck. With innovative technology and AI, we simplify credit building, reduce debt, and expand access to financial opportunities to those who need them the most. Founded in 2019, Kikoff is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by top-tier VC investors and NBA star Stephen Curry.

Why Kikoff:

This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.

What you'll do

• Own your product area like a business owner. Track the key metrics that matter for your surface – conversion, engagement, retention, revenue impact – and treat them as your own scorecard, not just your PM's. Proactively surface product gaps and opportunities before they're on the roadmap, and come with a POV on what to build next and why.
• Own design end-to-end for your product area – from problem framing and early exploration through pixel-perfect delivery – in close partnership with Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing. That ownership includes understanding the business model, unit economics, and user outcomes well enough to make tradeoffs without a PM in the room.
• Regularly challenge PRDs before executing: reframe problems, propose alternative solution directions, and push back when the initial framing isn't right. Bring your own data, user insight, or competitive context when you do – not just instinct.
• Use AI tools to compress the distance between idea and alignment. Build interactive prototypes, functional demos, and testable mockups fast – using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex – so decisions get made on real artifacts instead of static mocks. Shipping a working demo in a day should feel normal.
• Design highly polished, visually compelling interfaces with a strong point of view on typography, color, layout, visual hierarchy, and motion – across mobile and responsive web.
• Run rigorous multi-directional explorations before converging, and know how to sell a direction with a well-constructed rationale grounded in user outcomes and business impact – not just aesthetics.
• Drive design system evolution for your surface area – contributing new patterns, documenting usage, and coordinating with engineering to validate before shipping.
• Lead and participate in design critiques, giving specific, principled feedback tied to design principles and user outcomes.
• Hold the detail bar: every interaction, state, edge case, and visual decision is considered before handoff.

What we're looking for

• 6–10 years of product design experience, with a portfolio demonstrating exceptional visual craft and evidence of problem-framing – not just execution. Bonus points if the portfolio shows how your design work moved a metric or changed a product strategy.
• Fluency in the business layer. You are not just a strong designer. You are a mini-CEO for your product area. You understand conversion funnels, retention curves, and the revenue model well enough to reason about tradeoffs. You don't need to be an analyst, but you do need to care about outcomes beyond task completion rates.
• A track record of finding problems before they're assigned. You've identified a significant opportunity, built the case for it, and driven it to the roadmap — not just executed on what was handed to you.
• Comfort operating with autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment — you define the process, not wait for it. That includes knowing when to move fast with a working prototype and when to slow down and pressure-test the problem.
• Hands-on fluency with AI design, prototyping, and coding tools. You've used AI tools like to build functional demos or production-adjacent prototypes. You're not waiting for engineering to validate whether an idea is buildable – you test it yourself first.
• A strong eye for typography, color, layout, and motion, with the ability to articulate why each decision serves the user and the product.
• Experience designing consumer-facing mobile and web products; comfort moving fluidly across fidelity levels without losing quality at any stage.
• A demonstrated design systems contributor – someone who thinks in reusable patterns and has added meaningfully to a shared component library.
• Proficiency in Figma; strong prototyping instincts, especially for interaction and motion concepts that are hard to communicate statically.
• The ability to build cross-functional buy-in using evidence and clear rationale – not just preference or aesthetics.
• A low-ego collaborator who raises the bar through critique, mentorship, and shared craft standards.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Kikoff Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to complying with all federal, state, and local laws providing equal employment opportunities and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

Please reference the following for more information.