Staff / Principal Product Designer, Design Systems

Rho is the modern banking platform built for the AI era. Startups and growth-stage companies can open accounts in minutes, issue cards, manage expenses, pay bills, and close the books – all in one connected platform backed by real human support.

Rho is building the best business banking platform on earth. Not "one of." The best.

We're looking for a Staff or Principal Product Designer to own our design system, the governed, in code foundation that everything we ship stands on. This is not a role where you maintain a Figma library and file tickets. This is the role where you define the frontend layer of a financial operating system that companies trust with their money.

It's a long post on purpose. We'd rather you know exactly what this is before you apply.

Our design system is becoming the governed frontend layer of the product, components in code, rules enforced through lint and CI, documentation an AI agent can query and build against on spec. You would own that. The architecture, the tokens, the primitives, the motion language, the governance, the contribution model, and the standards that let 80 plus engineers and PMs ship on bar without a designer babysitting every pixel.

You'll partner with our frontend guild, our engineers, and the design team as genuine equals, not as a service desk. You'll decide what a component is, how it behaves, how it moves, what it enables, and where it must not bend. You'll set the craft bar for the entire org and then build the system that makes hitting that bar the path of least resistance.

You've been doing this for a while. We mean it, at least 7 years of product design experience, with real design systems ownership at scale. Not "contributed to a design system." Owned one. Built one. Governed one. Watched it get abused and fixed the governance so it couldn't happen again.

You are the kind of person who:

A few honest filters, to save us both time.

Small pods. Artifact first. Designers own their surfaces end to end, including research, QA, and the fight to get it shipped right. We use AI natively and expect you to. The design team is heads down on building the governed frontend layer this quarter, and this role is central to it.

We're in the office in New York because the best systems work happens shoulder to shoulder, obsessing over a real screen.

Restraint over decoration. Confidence over noise. Interfaces that feel calm because someone sweated every detail so the user never has to, and that feel alive because the motion is considered, not bolted on. We care about how money moving feels, how a card creation confirms, how a state transition lands. If "it looks fun, but does it do anything" is a question you ask yourself unprompted, you'll fit right in.

If you've read this far and you're already thinking about how you'd architect our token layer, we should talk.

Come ready to do two things when we meet, walk us through a real, working file (not just the polished case study frames), and show us a design system you actually built and governed. Bring one deeply complex, systems level project and one piece you're proud of at the pixel level, and tell us plainly which decisions were yours.