
The Opportunity & Scope
The Senior Product Designer is a hands on IC who'll set the craft bar for our new flagship mobile money app, Ethena Pay. Ethena Pay is live on iOS with Android on the way. The app still needs more features and moments of delight that make the best apps a joy to use. Your core job is closing that gap. You'll hold Ethena Pay to the standard of the best-designed consumer products, in money and beyond.
You'll own a share of the product end to end, the design system and the brand outright. About 80% of your time goes to product design and the system. The other 20% goes to complementing marketing design, so the quality people see in the app also shows up where we meet them, in launch content, X and on the store pages. You'll report to the Head of Product and work as a peer to our existing Product Designer.
Role Responsibilities
- Review the whole app and design system on iOS and Android. Turn what you find into a ranked plan for what to keep, fix or rebuild.
- Set and ship a new design standard with engineering: a component library, a motion and interaction language (timing, springs, haptics, transitions) and rules for layout, type and states. Build it into the system so every screen gets it by default.
- Design every state, not just the happy path: loading, pending, failed, limit reached, offline and "we don't know yet". Own the display rules for money so balances, rounding and pending vs settled amounts are always clear.
- Create the voice of the app. Terminology, error copy that says what happened and what to do next.
- Own the brand: write guidelines GTM can use without a designer, build partner co-branding and card artwork, and turn the app's best moments into X content, launch videos and store pages.
- Bring Android up to the same bar. Put both apps on the same components, tokens, motion and states, and decide where Material applies and where the brand wins.
- Raise the team's craft through critique and pairing, run lightweight research yourself, and help build the design practice as the team grows.
Required Skills and Experience
- A track record and portfolio of world-class mobile app design: Not "I can do it", but "I have done it and know how to do it better"! Several years designing shipped native apps whose design is a reason people use them.
- Motion and interaction design at a high level: transitions, springs, gestures, haptics and micro-interactions, shown as prototypes or recordings and specified precisely enough for engineers to build to the frame.
- Senior product design experience on a live neobank, payments, card or crypto money app where design is a competitive advantage (e.g. Revolut, Monzo, Wise, Nubank, Cash App, Plasma One), or other consumer mobile apps that stand out for their design (e.g. AirBnB).
- A portfolio that shows states, not just hero screens, plus an honest account of what shipped compared with what was designed.
- Evidence that you've raised a team's craft, not only your own: designers you critiqued or engineers you paired with got visibly better. Great if you've reviewed and rebuilt an existing app and its design system
- Real brand and marketing work you made yourself, such as an identity or a significant extension of one, card artwork, or launch and social content built from the product.
- Agent-native design: you use AI tools (Figma MCP, Claude Code or equivalent) to speed up your work while holding the craft bar, and you know where they fail.
About Ethena Labs
Ethena Labs, founded in 2023 by Guy Young in Lisbon, Portugal, develops USDe, a synthetic dollar backed by hedged collateral. Its protocol mints USDe against staked ether and bitcoin collateral hedged via perpetual shorts, distributing yield from staking and funding rates through sUSDe savings. Integrated across DeFi lending, perpetuals and custody, Ethena provides on-chain dollar stability without traditional bank issuance, inspired by earlier research on delta-neutral design. Headquartered in Lisbon with a distributed team across Europe, Ethena emphasizes risk engine rigor, transparency dashboards and audited hedging operations. Backed by leading investors including Dragonfly and Arthur Hayes' Maelstrom, the protocol navigates basis and custody risk carefully. Expect a markets and risk-focused culture that values hedging discipline, clear reporting and building stable, yield-bearing dollars for DeFi with operational prudence.
