Principal Designer, Money Movement

About PayPal

PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. We create innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, empowering consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy.

We operate a global, two-sided network at scale, connecting hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We facilitate connections, transactions, and payments, both online and in person. PayPal offers proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants, enabling payments on our platform. Our customers enjoy the flexibility to use their accounts for purchasing, receiving payments, transferring, and withdrawing funds. We enable safer fund exchanges with merchants using various funding sources like bank accounts, PayPal/Venmo balances, credit products, cards, cryptocurrencies, or gift cards. PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom also simplify peer-to-peer transfers. For merchants, we provide end-to-end payment solutions with authorization, settlement, instant access to funds, payouts, customer engagement, exchange/return processing, and risk management. We also reduce complexity in cross-border trade for consumers and merchants.

Our core values – Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness – guide our daily business, ensuring we work as one global team with customers at the center, while also caring for ourselves, each other, and our communities.

Department Overview: Experience Design

This role sits within the broader Experience Design department, comprising specialties such as Consumer, Merchant, Research, Content, Design Systems, and Operations. Experience Design is driving the strategy to evolve the PayPal experience beyond core transactions, into the full end-to-end commerce journey. This includes engaging customers before and after a sales transaction or money exchange. It is an exciting time to join a design team at the forefront of PayPal’s product and brand transformation. All positions are encouraged to tackle critical problems within well-integrated, multi-discipline teams (pods) and a culture geared towards explorations, bold provocations, and speedy market impact. The department is led by PayPal’s Chief Design Officer and collaborates closely with Engineering, Product Management, Brand Design, and Marketing teams.

Pod Overview: Peer to Peer App

The Peer to Peer App pod defines the product architecture, positioning, navigation structure, and experiences that guide users into the wider PayPal money movement ecosystem globally. This includes both onsite app/web and offsite partnership surface experiences. Designers in this pod regularly experiment with and evolve information architecture, content strategy, visual design, layout, ingress points, brand design expressions, personalization, in-page navigation, and value propositioning. These experiences demand radical content simplification without losing depth or utility. Designers must also blend hyper-utility with brand-defining visual expressions through an owned UI, interaction, motion, and digital design language. Equal parts form and function, all designers in this pod should excel in art direction, composition, brand design, contrast/hierarchy, information architecture, navigation, and formulating clear strategic points of view to support the app’s direct and differentiated customer value.

Role Overview: Principal Designer, Money Movement

The Principal Designer on our team serves as the Provocateur, pushing design thinking and generating concepts and opportunities others have yet to consider. You will be an exceptional taste maker in art direction, visual design, and brand expression within a digital product. As a Principal Designer, you will act as a creative director and leader of experience strategy for specific projects within a pod, setting the tone and standard for design output for the product and for more junior designers. Focused on craft, you will lead by example, driving the definition, strategy, and design concepts based on business briefs and product partners. While not a manager, you will mentor and lead a small group of designers with minimal administrative responsibility. 90-95% of this role is pure design, with the expectation that design quality will influence not only your pod but also other pods and our product design system team.

Standard Requirements

• You are kind, generous, nurturing, supportive, and can see beyond your own ideas or instincts.
• You love to study and design for consumer behaviors, with a specific interest in consumerism, retail, and evolving cultural norms.
• You believe in the power of brand, a well-articulated point of view, and the necessity of driving measurable business outcomes.
• You have a deep love and bias for designing products that blend interaction design with brand visual, and content design. All designers are expected to be as sensitive to visuals as they are to system and interaction details.

Role Requirements

• Your magical powers come through your ability to add clarity to opportunities and to frame problems that drive designers and product work into new realms.
• You love craft and are driven by refining and inventing new capabilities—either through broadened territories like motion design or technology/software tools.
• You possess an undeniable ability to inspire and provoke new thinking that can catalyze partners and designers on your respective teams.
• You have a remarkable ability to set and evolve the vision of a product experience through your strategic storytelling, problem-driven frameworks, insight gathering, comprehension of visual design, and interactive design craft.
• You have set new standards around design in your previous work and can demonstrate major shifts in quality and perspective.
• You have an incredible ability to tell stories of your work through presentation design, prototypes, storytelling, and explicit connection to larger business strategies.
• You have a deep understanding of how to motivate design work through explorations, concept development, and creative directions that draft off a core brand design system.
• You have a proven ability to broaden a creative brief and introduce unexpected visionary concepts that evolve the orthodoxy and convention of a product experience, on behalf of the user’s behaviors.
• You have the ability to take calculated risks in concepts—pushing against some conventions while not straying too far that it becomes unusable or incongruent with a brand positioning or identity.
• You thrive on provoking new thinking through design work—both in interaction, architecture, and visual brand design terms.
• You love being an independent contributor but also understand you are a leader that others will look up to and model against based on your insanely talented craft and visionary instincts.
• 12+ years of experience in consumer-facing digital product design work.

Designer Growth at PayPal

Our team places great focus on our culture, including our ways of working, feedback rituals, nurturing critique, and attention to each designer’s career aspirations. You will have opportunities to stretch into areas beyond your core pods and receive hands-on mentorship to ensure exposure and growth.

Recruitment Process

The process begins with an initial screening to assess your fit for this role or other potential roles/levels. Our goal is to ensure designers love and thrive in their area of focus, considering your personal ambitions. Following this screening, candidates may proceed through three additional phases:

1. Stage 1: An initial, 30-45 minute hiring manager meeting to review work samples.
2. Stage 2: A 1-hour case study panel presentation with cross-discipline members from design and partner teams.
3. Stage 3: A series of 1:1 30-45 minute interviews with panel members and potential additional partners.

Additional Information

The base pay for this role in San Jose, California, is expected to range from $218,000.00 to $323,950.00 Annually. Additional compensation may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation. PayPal maintains a balanced hybrid work model, requiring 3 days in the office for in-person collaboration and offering 2 days at your choice of office or home workspace. We offer comprehensive benefits covering financial, physical, and mental health. PayPal is committed to diversity and inclusion, providing equal employment opportunity regardless of protected characteristics and reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. We encourage all qualified candidates to apply, even if experiencing imposter syndrome.

Key skills/competency

• Product Design
• User Experience (UX)
• User Interface (UI)
• Visual Design
• Art Direction
• Interaction Design
• Information Architecture
• Design Strategy
• Prototyping
• Consumer Behavior Analysis