Product Design Lead

About blnk:

blnk is a fintech company with a mission of enabling inclusion through point-of-sale financing. Less than 4% of Egyptians have access to credit cards and can only afford to purchase products/services with cash that they have saved or are forced to borrow from hard money lenders at high interest rates. We’re changing this by enabling all consumers to instantly receive credit within minutes at their favorite merchants.

Job Scope:

Own the end-to-end product experience across blnk's web and mobile surfaces, with direct accountability for the customer-facing outcomes that define our business: onboarding conversion, KYC completion rate, activation, and post-approval engagement.

Lead, coach, and grow a team of product designers. Set the design bar, own the design system, and partner closely with Product, Engineering, Risk, Compliance, and Data to ship experiences that are intuitive, trusted, accessible, and compliant with the regulatory environment blnk operates in (FRA, CBE, PDPL, PCI-DSS).

Work effectively in a fast-moving, regulated market by calibrating depth of analysis to the decision at hand: bring evidence and careful analysis to decisions that are costly or difficult to reverse, and proceed pragmatically where they are not. A core part of this role is making that judgement well and being clear about the reasoning behind it.

Performance is assessed primarily on product and experience quality - onboarding and KYC funnel conversion, CSAT/NPS, accessibility conformance, and spec-to-shipped fidelity - alongside the design function's ability to keep pace with the product roadmap. Neither is traded away for the other without an explicit, documented decision.

Key Accountabilities:

• Team leadership. Lead, coach, and manage the product design team. Own hiring, performance management, and career development. Set the design culture standards for craft, rigour, and user-centric thinking rather than merely contributing to it.

• End-to-end design delivery. Direct the team's production of user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity UI across web and mobile matching fidelity to the stage of the decision: exploratory and lightweight while options are still open, precise and build-ready once work is committed. Avoid investing heavy polish in what has not yet been validated, and avoid shipping specs that hand ambiguity to engineering.

• Calibrated decision-making. Determine, case by case, how much analysis a design decision warrants, and be able to justify the call. Invest in research, funnel data, and cross-functional review before committing to decisions that are expensive or difficult to reverse: information architecture restructures, design system foundations, consent flows, regulatory disclosures, KYC step sequencing, and anything carrying legal or audit exposure. Where a decision is low-risk and readily reversible visual treatment, copy, layout of non-critical screens proceed and iterate rather than over-analysing. Where the risk classification is not obvious, escalate rather than guess.

• Decision ownership. Work effectively with incomplete information and shifting priorities, making decisions within remit rather than routinely deferring them upward. Where a decision genuinely needs more time or evidence, say so early and clearly, so Product and Engineering can plan around it.

• Design system ownership. Own and evolve blnk's design system, ensuring consistency, scalability, and adoption across all product surfaces (web, iOS, Android) and both language directions (Arabic RTL and English LTR).

• Information architecture. Shape the IA of our products so onboarding, KYC, credit management, and repayment flows are intuitive for users across the digital-literacy spectrum, including underbanked and first-time credit customers.

• Accessibility. Ensure all shipped experiences meet WCAG 2.1 AA at minimum. Accessibility is a hard requirement for blnk given our target segments and PDPL/regulatory posture not an enhancement.

• Arabic / RTL and bilingual design. Own the design quality of blnk's Arabic-first, bilingual product experience. Arabic-language UX is not a translation layer - it is a primary design surface.

• Regulatory and compliance-adjacent design. Partner with Legal, Compliance, and Security on consent flows (PDPL), regulatory disclosures (FRA Decision 139 and CBE guidance), pricing and fee transparency, and PCI-facing surfaces. Design decisions in these areas carry legal and audit implications.

• Research. Lead the team's user research activity - planning usability tests, running interviews, and analyzing insights - to inform design and product decisions. Build a lightweight, repeatable research cadence that fits within product planning cycles.

• Data-informed design. Partner with Product and Data/Analytics to ground design decisions in funnel data, A/B test results, and behavioural analytics - not qualitative signal alone.

• Design QA with Engineering. Establish and maintain a design QA process with frontend and mobile engineering to reduce spec-to-shipped variance and shorten the design-review feedback loop.

Qualifications, Experience, and Skills:

• 8 years of product design experience, with a meaningful portion in fintech, payments, lending, or another regulated consumer product. Fintech or regulated-consumer experience is a requirement, not a preference.

• 2+ years directly managing product designers (hiring, performance management, career development).

• Stay hands-on when needed: this is a leadership role, but at our stage you'll still jump into the work directly, whether that's flows, wireframes, or high-fidelity UI, when the team needs an extra pair of hands or a decision needs your own craft to move fast.

• Track record of shipping. Experience in an environment where products ship and iterate regularly, with features taken end-to-end from problem definition through release - not design work produced in isolation.

• Mobile-first design experience. Demonstrated fluency with native mobile design conventions (iOS HIG, Material Design). blnk is a mobile-primary product.

• Arabic / RTL and bilingual UI experience. Proven ability to design for Arabic-language users and bilingual product experiences. This is a hard requirement.

• Design system experience at scale. Experience building, scaling, or materially owning a multi-platform design system - not just consuming one.

• Strong proficiency with Figma, including libraries, variables, and team-scale file architecture.

• Information architecture and user-flow design for complex, multi-step, transactional products (onboarding, KYC, credit, payments).

• Strong visual and interaction design craft - clean, modern, considered interfaces with attention to detail.

• Quantitative literacy. Able to read a funnel, interpret an A/B test result, and translate drop-off data into a testable design hypothesis.

• Analytical depth. Evidence of at least one high-stakes design decision informed by real investigation - user research, funnel analysis, competitive or regulatory review - and the ability to explain what the evidence changed about the outcome.

• User research experience - planning, conducting, and analyzing qualitative research. Comfortable running the research function until it is separately resourced.

• Accessibility - practical experience designing to WCAG 2.1 AA.

• Communication and stakeholder management - presents design clearly to executive, engineering, and non-design audiences; iterates constructively on feedback.

• Portfolio demonstrating both UX problem-solving depth and visual/UI craft, ideally with regulated-consumer or fintech examples. Candidates should be prepared to walk through one decision made pragmatically on limited evidence and one made after deeper investigation, and to explain why they treated the two differently.