Director, Product Design Product Design Berlin

Payrails is an innovative technology company with a team that has many years of experience in the payment industry and a real-life understanding of the merchants' needs. We have seen the complexity firsthand and we have learned from all the challenges we've faced. Now we want to help leading technology companies around the world accept payments and build financial services with minimal upfront investments.

Our vision at Payrails is to reimagine payments. We do this by removing heavy reliance on Engineering efforts using composable building blocks that put the control firmly in the hands of our customers. We exist to help our customers become more productive and flexible, impacting directly on their ability to grow.

We are joined in our mission by top-tier clients Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, EQT, and General Catalyst alongside a great cast of knowledgeable angel investors to enable us to solve the growing complexity of payments.

At Payrails, we are committed to building a team full of the most talented people. Excellence is part of our values and we understand that in order to achieve this, we need to build an environment where skilled people can work openly, collaboratively, and with the utmost trust in one another. We believe people thrive the most when they are fully aware of what the business is trying to achieve, why it is important to the market, and what challenges lie in the way to reaching our goals. In such an environment we believe people can truly excel, grow and enjoy working together. We try hard to be a company where everyone is inspired and feels a sense of responsibility to do the right thing to help us bring our vision to life. Succeeding with us is about finding solutions to the most pressing problems and executing them effectively.

Your Team

Payrails is a dynamic workplace and our design team sits at the core of this landscape. Our mission is to drive a successful intersection between User Experience, Technology, and Business. We do this by focusing on 3 main pillars:

1. Understand merchant needs and challenges in their ecosystem
2. Identify simple and meaningful solutions
3. Partner with product and engineering to think holistically about systems and architectures that come together to create pragmatic solutions

Our Design team offers you the opportunity to work alongside a group of highly ambitious and knowledgeable Product Managers and Designers, while being faced with highly complex problems that affect customers on a global scale.

What You Will Be Doing

Lead by example, actively contributing to design projects from concept through execution, balancing hands-on design work with strategic direction.

Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and stakeholders to tackle complex design problems and create user-centered solutions that align with both user needs and business objectives.

Partner with product managers to prioritize design opportunities and translate them into actionable, high-quality deliverables.

Guide and mentor a small but growing team of designers, fostering a collaborative, hands-on design culture where everyone contributes and innovates.

Take ownership of our design system, working directly with front-end engineers to build and refine components that ensure consistency and efficiency across our product.

Continuously drive alignment and facilitate design discussions with stakeholders to build consensus and move quickly, iterating as needed to keep pace with our fast-evolving startup environment.

Balance strategic direction with tactical design tasks, including UI/UX design, prototyping, and interaction design in Figma, to directly impact our product's quality and user experience.

You'll Be Great for This Role If

You have 10+ years of hands-on product design experience, with at least 5 years leading design teams or projects in high-growth environments, ideally within startups or tech.

You're skilled in Enterprise-level product design but enjoy being directly involved in the design process, from ideation to implementation.

You thrive in ambiguous and fast-paced settings, able to shift seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on design tasks.

You think holistically about user and business needs, keeping outcomes at the forefront while navigating trade-offs in a lean, startup setting.

You are proficient in Figma and can create and iterate on high-quality, practical designs, articulating your decision-making process clearly.

You're comfortable synthesizing feedback from different sources, making informed decisions quickly, and adapting to change.

You bring a collaborative and proactive mindset, excellent communication skills, and the ability to inspire cross-functional partners.

You have a portfolio that demonstrates your design thinking, problem-solving abilities, and measurable impact, especially in product ecosystems and complex domains like payments.

Please submit an up-to-date portfolio in English as part of your application.

Why You Should Join Payrails

• You can truly create your own path by taking responsibility and implementing your own ideas.
• We offer visa and relocation support to you and your family where required.
• We offer a hybrid working environment.
• You have 27 annual vacation days + 1 day of paid birthday leave for you to have fun and party without any worries!
• We get together regularly for team lunches and events.
• You help us shape the future of payments.