Senior / Lead Product Designer

Job Title - Senior / Lead Product Designer
Location - New York, NY (Hybrid)
Duration - 12 Months
The search
XDuce Studio has been exclusively retained to find a founding-level product designer for an AI-native fintech company in New York. The company is early, well-funded by top-tier investors, and already serving real customers with real revenue.
They are building the system of record for how businesses understand and manage financial exposure currency, commodity, and freight risk. Today that work is done by treasury desks at large institutions or not done at all: importers, manufacturers, and traders mostly run on spreadsheets, phone calls, and instinct. Our client's platform ingests contracts, ERP data, inventory, cash flows, and messy operational records, builds a continuous picture of exposure from it, and then constructs and manages hedging positions that adjust as markets move.
What the role actually involves
This is the design function, not a seat in one. The person who takes it will own product design end-to-end problem framing, information architecture, interaction design, visual craft, prototyping, and shipped UI.
Concretely, that means designing exposure dashboards and position views that hold hundreds of live data points without overwhelming the reader; scenario and what-if analysis tools; execution and approval workflows where a human signs off on a machine's recommendation and needs enough context to do so responsibly; alerting that earns attention rather than training people to ignore it; and the design system that holds all of it together as the surface expands.
It also means talking to users directly. Traders, CFOs, and operations leads at commodity businesses have deeply held mental models about risk, and the product either matches them or fails.
The bar
We are looking for judgment more than tenure, though in practice this tends to mean six or more years of product design with significant time on genuinely complex software.
The strongest signal in a portfolio is evidence of having made dense, high-consequence information feel calm and obvious. Trading interfaces, financial tooling, analytics platforms, operational systems, risk or reporting products anything where the screen carries real numerical weight and a misread has consequences. Portfolios composed mainly of consumer apps, marketing sites, or clean-but-simple flows will not clear this bar, however beautiful the execution.
Beyond that:

• Comfort with ambiguity that is structural rather than temporary. Requirements will often not exist, and defining the question is part of the job.
• Systems thinking alongside real craft. Both, not one, traded against the other.
• The ability to reason about data models, edge cases, and empty and error states with engineers, rather than designing the happy path and handing it over.
• Fluency with AI as a design accelerant using tools like Claude, Cursor, v0, Figma Make, Lovable, and Midjourney to compress the path from vision to working prototype, and knowing which shortcuts hold up under real data and which don't.
• Willingness to work in a small, senior, fast-moving team where the roadmap shifts and the market is still being learned.

Useful but not required: exposure to trading, treasury, derivatives, commodities, or FX; experience designing AI-driven products where a human must trust and approve a machine's output; front-end familiarity sufficient to protect implementation quality; prior experience as a first or founding designer.
Why the role is worth considering
Founding design ownership at a company past the concept stage. Direct access to founders and to users with no layers between. A category with no design precedent, which means the work sets the standard rather than iterating on someone else's. A shipping cadence measured in days.

Thanks And Regards,

Amit Lakhotia