Lead Designer, Digital Experience Standards

About the Team/Role:

As the Lead Designer for Digital Experience Standards at WEX Inc., you will set and hold the bar for experience quality across our digital portfolio and codify it through scalable platforms. Reporting to the Director of Digital Platforms & Practice, you are a senior individual contributor accountable for how our products look, sound, and feel as more of the experience is generated by agents rather than assembled by hand.

This is a "tastemaker" role. We define taste as the ability to draw from deep customer empathy, consider your product's brand tone, voice, and identity, and channel them into an end-to-end experience that is consistent, recognizable, seamless, and delightful. As AI collapses the cost of producing an interface, taste becomes the constraint that matters-and the difference between a portfolio that feels intentional and one that merely functions.

This role sits within WEX's centralized digital standards and practices group. While design teams are aligned to individual product lines, this position connects that work through shared standards, design systems, and AI-enabled practices. You will influence quality across dozens of web and mobile experiences, partner with the branding team, and coach designers rather than own a single product's roadmap.

If you hold strong opinions about craft, have an instinct for what customers feel but do not say, and can encode that judgment so other people-and agents-apply it at scale, this is the role for you.

What You'll Do:

• Set Experience Standards & Taste: Define what "good" looks like across the portfolio and encode it as standards, patterns, and reference examples that any designer or agent can apply without you in the room.
• Make Coherence Scalable: Build a system in which experiences feel recognizably WEX in brand, tone, voice, and interaction regardless of which team or agent produced them.
• Lead Portfolio-Level Critique: Lead critique and calibration that builds judgment in other designers and raises craft rather than policing it.
• Anticipate Emerging Modalities: Bring a point of view on voice, conversational, and multimodal interaction so standards anticipate how customers will work rather than how they have worked.
• Own the Design OS for the Agentic Lifecycle: Own the reusable components, skills, standards, and machine-readable context that agents invoke to generate consistent UI in ADLC Foundations Hub and Discovery & Delivery Systems.
• Translate Design Intent into Build-Ready Artifacts: Partner with the design system engineer to create tokens, patterns, schemas, and documentation that both humans and agents can consume.
• Make Quality the Default: Make the standard the path of least resistance, so generated experiences inherit accessibility, usability, and brand quality by default rather than by review.
• Use AI-Assisted Coding and Prototyping: Use modern AI-assisted coding and prototyping tools to explore concepts, test interactions, and operationalize repeatable design guidance. Tools discussed for this role include Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex.
• Define Experience Quality Measurement: Establish an enterprise experience quality rubric with dimensions, criteria, and severity scales for usability, accessibility, brand and voice coherence, language clarity, and end-to-end journey quality.
• Build Agentic Evaluation at Scale: Develop evaluation capabilities that allow agents to navigate live customer portals, mobile apps, and internal tools across full journeys and return evidence-backed findings.
• Make Quality Visible to Leadership: Produce a portfolio-level experience quality index and heat map showing strengths, weaknesses, and specific quality dimensions across lines of business.
• Connect Quality to Business Outcomes: Correlate experience quality with NPS, CSAT, and customer trust measures, and use those signals to direct standards, coaching, and investment toward experiences where customer risk is highest.
• Partner and Influence Across Teams: Work with product designers, engineering, and the branding team to unify experiences across WEX's digital portfolio and raise the quality and polish of web and mobile products.
• Coach Without Direct People Management: Coach and mentor designers across product teams, bringing exceptional visual/UI design taste and attention to detail while maintaining a collaborative, outcome-focused approach.

What You Bring:

• Design Experience: Approximately 8-10 years of product, system, web, or related design experience across multiple products or portfolios.
• Exceptional Visual/UI Craft: Demonstrated visual design taste, artistic judgment, strong attention to detail, and a high bar for polish and aesthetics across digital experiences.
• Standards and Systems Thinking: Ability to define, document, and scale design standards, patterns, and systems that improve consistency and quality across teams and products.
• AI-Native Design Practice: Strong fluency with AI coding and prototyping tools, including tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex, and the ability to use them practically in design workflows.
• Machine-Readable Design Guidance: Understanding of how to express design standards and context in reusable, structured formats such as Design MD/design.md so people and AI agents can apply them consistently.
• Customer-Centered Judgment: Deep customer empathy and the ability to translate customer needs, brand identity, tone, voice, and interaction principles into cohesive end-to-end experiences.
• Collaboration and Influence: Low-ego, collaborative, and outcome-focused approach with the ability to influence designers and cross-functional partners without relying on direct authority.

Nice to Have:

• Background in graphic design, web design, human factors, or another related artistic or design discipline.
• Experience coaching or mentoring designers across multiple product teams or portfolios.
• Familiarity with general-purpose AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini; this is useful but does not replace practical fluency with AI coding and prototyping tools.
• UX boot camp experience.

Why This Role Matters:

WEX is working to unify the quality of digital experiences across business lines while expanding the use of AI in how those experiences are designed and built. This role will help shape the standards, systems, and evaluation practices that make high-quality, accessible, recognizable WEX experiences repeatable across dozens of web and mobile products. By turning design judgment into reusable guidance for both people and agents, the role helps WEX scale experience quality without relying on manual review alone.