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Rho is a modern banking platform built for startups, offering account opening, card issuance, expense management, bill payment, and financial close functionality in a single integrated platform. The company is seeking a Staff or Principal Product Designer to own and architect the design system—the governed, code-based foundation underlying all product shipping.
This role goes beyond maintaining a Figma library. You will define the frontend layer of a financial operating system, establishing the architecture, design tokens, primitives, motion language, governance model, and contribution standards that enable 80+ engineers and product managers to ship at high quality without constant designer oversight. You'll partner with the frontend guild, engineers, and design team as a genuine equal, setting craft standards across the organization and building systems that make hitting those standards the path of least resistance.
You'll own decisions about what constitutes a component, how it behaves and moves, what it enables, and where it cannot compromise. The design system will include components in code, rules enforced through linting and CI, and documentation queryable by AI agents for spec-driven development.
The ideal candidate has 7+ years of product design experience with proven design systems ownership at scale—not contribution, but true ownership and governance. You design in code or are eager to, believing Figma is a communication tool, not the build environment. You have genuine taste and high standards across branding, typography, motion, and microinteractions, with opinions you can defend. You think in primitives, states, and edge cases rather than individual screens. You ship fast and work out loud, sharing messy work rather than disappearing for weeks. You hold a firm craft bar while remaining open to critique and defending decisions with reasoning. You find financial workflows—dense, multi-role, permission-scoped—intellectually engaging rather than intimidating.
The team works in small pods, artifact-first, with designers owning surfaces end-to-end including research and QA. The design team is currently focused on building the governed frontend layer, and this role is central to that effort. The position is in-office in New York because the best systems work happens collaboratively, obsessing over real screens together. The company values restraint over decoration, confidence over noise, and interfaces that feel calm because every detail was considered, with motion that is intentional rather than decorative.
