Lead Product Designer

Lead Product Designer

New York, NY

Overview

Role: Product Designer

5 days a week in NYC HQ

Base salary: $175k-$250k

Equity: Competitive initial equity package + refreshers

5+ years of experience

About Pillar

Pillar is building the next-generation commodity risk management stack for the $10T physical economy. We combine real-time market data with AI-powered exposure modeling and automated trade generation to arm operators with precise protection from volatility. From instant execution to continuous monitoring, alerts, and recommendations, Pillar turns complex market risk into a fully managed, always-on hedging engine.

We were founded in 2023 by the youngest macro market-maker at Barclays and a trading systems engineer at Coinbase, and have raised over $20M in capital from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Crucible Capital, Neo, DST Global, and more.

The Role

We're hiring a Product Designer to help define what modern commodity risk software should look and feel like.

At Pillar, design means making an exceptionally complex domain clear, fast, and intuitive for people with different roles, levels of market expertise, and ways of working. You'll own critical product experiences from ambiguous problem through shipped solution, working directly with founders, engineers, and customers.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for a designer with great taste, strong product judgment, and an eye for the tiny details that determine how a product feels. You should be equally comfortable thinking in systems, learning complex workflows, prototyping quickly, and refining an interaction until it is excellent.

What You'll Do

• Own core product experiences end-to-end—from customer research and early concepts through polished UI, launch, and iteration
• Learn complex commodity risk workflows and turn them into one clear, intuitive experience across diverse users, workflows, and domains
• Work directly with founders, engineers, and customers to define product direction and translate real operating needs into shipped solutions
• Solve ambiguity through making, using Figma and AI tools to rapidly prototype, test, and validate ideas
• Design thoughtful AI-native interactions that balance automation with clarity, trust, and user control
• Build Pillar's design system and uphold a high craft bar across information architecture, dense workflows, typography, spacing, and interaction feel

What We Are Looking For

• 5+ years of product design experience, ideally working on B2B software, fintech, or other complex products
• A strong portfolio demonstrating product thinking, interaction design, systems thinking, and polished visual execution
• Great taste and attention to feel: strong instincts about what makes a product clear, beautiful, and satisfying down to the smallest detail
• Comfort with complexity and range: the curiosity to master difficult workflows and create a coherent experience for users with different needs and expertise
• A maker's approach to ambiguity: you move quickly and independently by sketching, prototyping, testing, and iterating
• A track record of taking products from concept to production, with strong Figma and design-system skills and clear cross-functional communication

Nice to Have

• Experience designing fintech, trading, commodity, risk-management, or data-heavy products
• Experience with real-time interfaces, data visualization, or decision-support tools
• Experience building or maintaining a design system for a growing product
• Experience conducting customer interviews and usability research in a complex domain
• You've coded and shipped full-stack applications or working prototypes and are comfortable using Git

Benefits

• Competitive Salary & Equity
• 401(k) Program
• Health, Dental, Vision, and Life Insurance
• Unlimited PTO and Flexible Hours
• Paid lunch, coffee, snacks, and dinner if you're staying late
• Monthly Gym Stipend
• Regular Team Off-Sites