Senior Product Designer, Operations Tools

Who We Are: Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure  for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more. Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts. Our global team is a diverse group of experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals who are working to achieve our mission of opening financial services to everyone on the planet. We're deeply committed to open-source contributions and fostering a vibrant community, continuously enhancing our award-winning, developer-friendly API and the robust infrastructure behind it. Alpaca is proudly backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, Horizons Ventures, Opera Tech Ventures, SBI Group, Derayah Financial, Unbound, Peak XV, Elefund, and Y Combinator. Our Team Members: We're a dynamic team of 400+ globally distributed members who thrive working from our favorite places around the world, with teammates spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond! We're searching for passionate individuals eager to contribute to Alpaca's rapid growth. If you align with our core values—Stay Curious, Have Empathy, and Be Accountable—and are ready to make a significant impact, we encourage you to apply. Your Role - (12-month contract) We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer to design and build internal tools for complex financial operations. This is a hands-on role for someone who can move fluidly between user research, systems design, AI prototyping, and production code. You’ll partner with product, engineering, and operations to turn complicated workflows, business rules, and technical constraints into intuitive, reliable tools.

You should be comfortable working independently—from identifying the problem through shipping and iterating on a production solution. What you’ll do - Own the end-to-end design process: Lead projects from research and workflow discovery through prototyping, validation, detailed design, implementation, and post-launch iteration. - Design complex operational workflows: Build tools involving multiple user roles, data sources, business rules, approvals, exceptions, and audit requirements. - Build AI-powered prototypes: Rapidly create functional prototypes for alignment across multiple stakeholders. - Turn prototypes into production experiences: Write and contribute code within production environments, working through code review, testing, deployment, and iteration. - Champion operational users: Understand the needs and constraints of financial operations teams through interviews, observation, workflow analysis, and usability testing. - Apply systems-level thinking: Design data-rich interfaces that help users monitor activity, investigate issues, manage exceptions, and make informed decisions. - Collaborate with engineering: Work comfortably within engineering processes, helping push production code into the front end.   - Contribute to the design system: Create scalable patterns for tables, forms, dashboards, alerts, approvals, audit histories, and AI-assisted interactions. - Execute independently: Manage multiple initiatives while clearly communicating progress, risks, dependencies, and decisions. Who you are - You have 6+ years of experience in product design in startup or other fast paced environments  - You have designed and launched in complex or technical industries, such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, infrastructure, logistics, manufacturing, aerospace, or automotive.