Lead Product Designer

At Earnest, we believe in a world where paying for your education takes less time than earning your degree.  Join us on our mission to empower anyone seeking higher education to reduce the total price tag of their degree, supercharge their ability to pay down student debt, and get on the right financial track fast.

A little background on Earnest: We're a remote first FinTech company with an accomplished team who believe consumer lending can be radically improved and are doing something about it. We are disrupting the trillion dollar student loan industry by redefining what it means to be creditworthy. We created a company that combines data science, streamlined design, and technology to:

• Build products that simplify the lending process
• Personalize loans to suit the needs of our customers
• Engage with our customers through more human experiences

What makes an “Earnie” culture: 

Earnest’s culture is as dynamic as the products we’re building and defining every day. We’re a fast-growing company, and that means we’re constantly integrating the new perspectives of every individual.

Earnies define our culture as:

• Earn Happy Customers
• Our success comes from anticipating their needs and providing the solutions they’re looking for.
• Better is Better
• The path to great means getting better every day. We push ourselves, and each other, to remain curious and think differently. 
•  PhD in Moving Fast
• Our customers are tired of long wait times and large student loan bills so we constantly seek out ways to deliver faster.  
•  Passion for Challenges
• Perseverance and optimism are just the start to take on the inertia of a national trillion-dollar problem. 
•  Impact is a Team Sport
• We maximize our impact when we act as one team.

Our Earnies are fun, innovative, and willing to roll up their sleeves to help their team succeed in a fast-paced environment. If this sounds like you, and you want to join us on our mission to radically disrupt a trillion dollar fintech industry, keep reading to find out how. 

As Lead Product Designer, you will have significant ownership of design objectives and strategy. This role will be responsible for discovering opportunities for product excellence and differentiation on our products. Combining an understanding of business opportunities with a deep empathy for the user, you’ll work on creating experiences that help students get loans with terms that work for them. You’ll collaborate with key stakeholders across the organization to determine strategy, roadmaps and deliverables while also maintaining a lot of autonomy over your work.

You will work on the following: 

• Product Strategy 
  • Conceptualize and design for web (including mobile) and print
  • Contribute at a high level for design strategy and communicate the vision, roadmap, and goals for a business
  • Define short- and long-term design opportunities for the product. 
  • Collaborate closely with Product Management, Engineering, Analytics and Research to define product solutions as well as business efficiencies
  • Partner with Product Managers to develop the strategy and rationale for product solutions 
  • Partner closely with Engineering to ensure our implementation and user experience is of high-quality
  • Prioritize internal, cross-functional, and external design resource(s).
  • Create and iterate on solutions that are inspired by a deep empathy for our users
  • Identify key opportunities to meet and prioritize user and business needs
  • Use research and data to inform and implement solutions
  • Ideate new product features and improvements.
  • Work collaboratively to prioritize feature ideas. 
  • Flesh out feature concepts.

• UX Design
  
  • Develop strategic insights and strategies to guide UX development
  • Create high level user flows for complex products.
  • Design processes, features, and components that can be used 
  • Understand business and technical needs
  • Works cross-functionally (in and outside of the product team) to create innovative features. 

• UI Design
  
  • Design processes, features, and components that can be used across products
  • Create UI components for product flows.
  • Contribute components to the Earnest design system.
  • Work collaboratively with Engineering to ensure finished product meets design specifications. 
  • Work in close collaboration with Design Leadership to grow the team as well as to inform and improve design processes

Ideal background and expertise: 

• 6+ years of designing web-based products, with experience with UX and UI 
• High proficiency in Figma
• Familiarity with other UX/UI software for creating flows, prototypes
• Ability to analyze and use data and research to inform decisions
• Utilize understanding and analysis of quantitative data, qualitative user understanding, and knowledge of business capabilities to develop features and product experiments
• Experience leading and launching end-to-end product / product features
• Attention to detail
• Excellent verbal and communication skills
• Excellent analytical skills to break down and solve complex problems
• Proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally
• Design discovery (user research, competitive research)
• Deep user empathy around complex/emotional categories

Earnest believes in enabling our employees to live their best lives. We offer a variety of perks and competitive benefits that include: 

• Health, Dental, & Vision benefits plus savings plans
• Work anywhere in the U.S. 
• Mac computers + work from home stipend to set up your home office
• Monthly internet and phone reimbursement
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• 401(k) plan to help you save for retirement plus a company match
• Robust tuition reimbursement program
• $1,000 travel perk on each Earnie-versary to anywhere in the world 
• Competitive days of annual PTO
• Annual “my day” 
• Pet insurance!
• Competitive parental leave
• Plenty of Earnest swag, optional in person team gatherings, picnics, celebrations, and plenty of fun virtual events 

At Earnest, we are committed to building an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion, equity, and belonging enables us to move forward with our mission. We are dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage anyone to apply if your experience is close to what we are looking for.  

Earnest provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for the position in a manner consistent with the Fair Chance Ordinance.