Morgan Stanley at Work, UX Designer - Vice President

UX Designer – Vice President

Morgan Stanley At Work is seeking a VP, UX Lead to drive end-to-end user experience strategy and execution across digital products that support workplace financial solutions (e.g., equity compensation, workplace benefits/financial wellness, and participant experiences). This leader will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Content, and Design Systems to deliver experiences that are intuitive, accessible, and measurable—balancing user needs, business outcomes, and platform constraints.

What you'll do in the role:

• Lead UX strategy and execution for one or more high-impact product areas within MS At Work, from discovery through delivery and iteration.
• Translate complex financial/operational concepts into clear, usable workflows and interaction models.
• Partner with Product Management to shape roadmaps, define problem statements, and set measurable experience outcomes (e.g., activation, task success, conversion, reduced support contacts).
• Drive high-quality design craft: information architecture, interaction design, prototyping, and design specifications.
• Establish and maintain UX standards, patterns, and governance in partnership with the Design System team.
• Champion user-centered practices: research intake, hypothesis development, usability testing, and evidence-based decisioning.
• Collaborate with Engineering to ensure feasibility, design intent, and build quality; support implementation reviews.
• Ensure experiences meet accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG) and align with brand guidelines.
• Mentor and coach designers (and potentially manage a small team, depending on org needs); raise the bar on craft and execution.
• Communicate effectively to senior stakeholders—presenting rationale, tradeoffs, and recommended paths forward.

Skills Required:

• 9.5 years of comparable experience from work and higher education
• Experience in financial services, workplace benefits, equity compensation, or regulated environments.
• Experience with authenticated account experiences, onboarding, permissions/roles, and data-heavy dashboards.
• Familiarity with analytics-driven UX, experimentation (A/B testing), and funnel optimization.
• People management experience (or strong mentorship track record) and experience scaling UX practices.
• An outstanding portfolio that demonstrates how you have created experiences that solved business and user needs
• 5-7 years of experience as a UX designer as a key contributor to the success of products that have launched
• Mastery of strategic, hard, and soft UX skills
• Bachelor's degree in design or related field; master's degree is a plus
• Fluency in Figma
• Ability to fully utilize and work with less skilled designers
• You thrive in a collaborative, explorative environment and value being on a diverse team that you can bounce ideas off of, get critical feedback from, and unite to mature design thinking in a large organization
• You practice active listening and contribute to group situations (brainstorms, audits, critiques, whiteboard sessions, etc.)
• You have a high tolerance for projects with ambiguity and the ability to set the direction for undefined, complex projects
• You are resilient in the face of obstacles
• You have a relentless desire to validate assumptions and uncover a problems' root cause by testing, learning, and iterating
• You constantly seek opportunities to evangelize and promote design thinking in a large organization
• You can manage multiple priorities with tight timelines
• You are willing to roll up your sleeves and do hands-on work
• You can glean insights from data and incorporate them into design solutions
• Previous work experience in finance is a plus