Most banking products were not designed for the people who use them. They were designed for the systems behind them. The result is friction, confusion, and moments where users make financial decisions without fully understanding what they are agreeing to.

This role exists to change that.

You will own complex, multi-step product journeys end to end across web and mobile banking. You will sit inside a cross-functional squad alongside product and engineering, operate with high autonomy, and be expected to shape problems before solving them.

The Problem You Will Solve

Banking flows are inherently complex. Onboarding involves compliance. Payments involve risk. Account management involves states and edge cases that most users never anticipate until they are already in them.

The job is not to simplify for the sake of it. The job is to make complexity navigable, to make trade offs visible, and to make users feel in control of decisions that have real financial consequences.

What You Will Own

• Discovery and problem framing across your product area, including hypothesis definition, scope shaping, and prioritisation before a single screen is designed

• End to end delivery from user flows and information architecture through wireframes, prototypes, and high fidelity UI for web and mobile

• Research synthesis, taking usability findings, analytics, and customer interviews and turning them into concrete, prioritised design decisions

• Design system stewardship, using existing patterns correctly and proposing, documenting, and socialising new ones where gaps exist

• Cross-functional collaboration, working tightly with product managers and engineering leads from early concept through to shipped, measurable solution

• Mentorship of mid-level and junior designers through critiques, pairing, and structured feedback

You Must Have All Five of These

If you cannot demonstrate all five clearly in your CV and portfolio, please do not apply. Screening will filter against these specifically before any manual review takes place.

1. At least 5 years of product design experience in fintech, banking, or a regulated financial domain, designing digital products shipped to real users, verifiable by employer, product name, or documented case study. Internships and purely visual or marketing roles do not count toward this total.

2. At least one end to end case study covering a complex, multi-step transactional flow such as onboarding, payments, or account management, showing your specific role, the constraints you navigated, and measurable outcomes

3. Documented experience proposing or extending a design system, not just consuming one. You should be able to show a pattern you defined, documented, or socialised with an engineering team

4. Demonstrated research synthesis, showing a specific instance where you took usability test findings, analytics data, or customer interviews and translated them into concrete design changes with stated rationale

5. Evidence of shaping product scope, a specific example where you worked with a product manager or engineering lead to negotiate constraints, reframe a problem, or change what was built based on your design input

What Senior Means Here

You are not executing briefs. You are expected to:

• Frame the problem before proposing a solution, and push back when the problem is not yet well defined

• Run discovery independently, decide what research is needed, and synthesise it without being directed

• Make design rationale, trade offs, and impact legible to engineers, product managers, and executives without relying on jargon

• Hold a high bar for information architecture and interaction quality, and be able to explain what alternatives you considered and why you chose what you did

• Mentor others in a way that raises the team's output, not just your own

How Impact Is Measured

This role is measured on outcomes, not output.

The metrics that matter: task completion rate on key flows, error rate on complex multi-step journeys, activation and onboarding conversion, and design system adoption across the product. If those numbers move in the right direction and the team is shipping better work faster, the role is succeeding.

How the Team Works

Design sits inside cross-functional squads and shapes strategy directly. It is not a service function. Work is shared early, challenged often, and improved continuously. You are expected to bring a point of view, defend it with reasoning, and update it when you are wrong.

The operating environment is office first across Calgary, Winnipeg, and Toronto. Regular in-person presence with your product squad is expected, not optional.

One Thing We Ask Before You Apply

We ask every applicant to record a short video answer to one question. It takes less than three minutes. We know it is uncomfortable. We ask anyway because it tells us something a CV cannot.

The question is:

Tell us about a complex, multi-step flow you designed in a financial or regulated product. What was the hardest trade off you had to make, and how did you decide?

We are not assessing presentation style or production quality. We are assessing how you think about hard problems and whether you can communicate trade offs clearly to people who were not in the room when you made them.

A Transparent Note from the Recruiter

I use an AI assisted screening tool to do a first pass on applications before I review them together with the team. It does not make final decisions. I do. But it flags applications that do not clearly address the five criteria above, and that shapes the depth and order of our review.

If your application does not speak to those five things directly, it will likely be deprioritised regardless of how strong your broader experience is.

After the screening pass, the team and I review your portfolio together. We are looking for honest case studies: real problem framing, your specific role, the trade offs you made, and what actually happened. Outcomes that did not go perfectly are more useful to us than polished stories that did.

You will hear back from us regardless of the outcome. That is not a standard line. It is a commitment.

Hubert Warszta
Tech Recruiter | WhyHireWrong? | SIGL:IO