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Allocate is building an operating system for private markets, enabling wealth advisors and their clients to access, transact in, and manage private market investments. The platform serves 350+ advisory firms, 1,500+ GP relationships, and manages $5B+ in assets.
You will own and build the design function at Allocate, reporting directly to the CEO and partnering closely with product and engineering leadership. This is a build role with hands-on involvement—a small team, working design system, and live product already exist, and your mandate is to elevate all three: set the quality standard, grow the team, and define design's scope and ownership.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning product design across the advisor and GP experience, end-to-end
- Applying deep private markets knowledge to ground decisions in understanding, not assumption
- Setting and maintaining quality bars through clear mechanisms: definition of done, pre-launch usability gates, live product friction tracking
- Leading the hardest problems from research through prototyping and handoff
- Building and coaching the design team: hiring, leveling, growth paths, feedback, and 1:1s
- Collaborating on roadmap and product strategy alongside leadership, forcing tradeoffs early
- Strengthening the design system to make consistency the default and speed the byproduct
- Owning brand expression across the marketing site, campaigns, launches, and client collateral
- Establishing a validation habit: fast, evidence-led, prototype-first
- Leveraging AI-assisted tools for research, exploration, and prototyping
- Defining how design works with the rest of the company through rituals, tooling, and process
You bring 10+ years in product design with several years leading and managing designers. You have built or substantially grown a design function—hiring, leveling, coaching, setting practice. You are comfortable leading distributed teams while maintaining craft and cohesion. You remain hands-on and want to stay that way; leading and making are the same job for you.
You are a strong systems thinker with design system experience through real growth. You are comfortable across product and brand, knowing when each is the lever. Critically, you have direct experience designing for private markets or adjacent institutional finance domains (fund structures, capital calls, distributions, portfolio reporting are familiar ground).
You are prototype-first: fluent in Figma and Magic Patterns, ready to build in Claude when code is the fastest path. You are pragmatic and experiment-friendly, favoring multiple options and early validation over opinion. You collaborate well with engineers, PMs, and stakeholders, and you communicate clearly in 1:1s, exec rooms, and in front of clients.
You are based in or willing to relocate to the Bay Area for the Palo Alto office.
