Director, Experience Design

Minimum Qualifications:

• 10+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree OR Any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 2 years of experience leading others
• Additional Responsibilities & Preferred Qualifications:
• Additional Responsibilities
• Define and champion the end-to-end experience vision for payments and checkout across merchants, markets, devices, and payment methods.
• Establish shared experience patterns for checkout components, payment method selection, authentication, identity and risk interventions, errors and declines, transaction status, and receipts.
• Map and simplify the full commerce lifecycle, including cart, authorization, authentication, settlement, refunds, disputes, and recurring billing.
• Develop a migration strategy that enables teams to move legacy experiences onto a unified system incrementally while protecting conversion and business performance.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, Risk, Compliance, and regional teams to reconcile customer needs with regulatory requirements, fraud controls, processor and network behavior, and local payment practices.
• Use experimentation, funnel analytics, customer insights, and operational data as core inputs to design strategy and decision-making.
• Establish design principles, standards, and reusable patterns that reduce bespoke solutions and enable teams to launch high-quality payment experiences faster.
• Drive alignment across teams and organizations, influencing partners and leaders beyond the direct reporting structure.
• Communicate effectively with senior executives on tradeoffs among conversion, trust, risk, cost, customer experience, and speed.
• Hire, develop, and lead a high-performing design team across platform and surface-level experiences.
• Define and measure experience outcomes, including checkout completion, adoption of shared patterns, launch velocity, and reduction in customer support contacts.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience leading experience or product design for payments, checkout, commerce, financial services, or other complex transactional systems at scale.
• Demonstrated expertise in systems thinking, platform design, and design systems, with a track record of creating reusable experiences across products and teams.
• Strong understanding of payment and checkout journeys, including authorization, authentication, payment methods, transaction states, failures, refunds, disputes, and recurring payments.
• Experience designing within complex regulatory, risk, fraud, identity, and technical constraints while maintaining a simple customer experience.
• Proven ability to use experimentation, conversion funnels, behavioral data, and qualitative research to guide design decisions.
• Track record of leading organizational change and driving adoption of shared experience standards across independently operating teams.
• Experience building, coaching, and developing senior design talent and multidisciplinary design teams.
• Exceptional executive communication, storytelling, and influence skills, with the ability to create alignment across Product, Engineering, Design, Risk, Compliance, and business leadership.
• Ability to balance customer trust and simplicity with conversion, business performance, technical feasibility, and operational requirements.
• Subsidiary:
• PayPal
• Travel Percent:
• 0
• The base pay for this role will depend on where you work and the relevant experience and expertise you bring. The expected range of pay for this role by location is:
• Primary Location | Pay Range:
• Austin, Texas: ($198,000.00 - $294,250.00 Annually)
• Additional Location(s) | Pay Range:
• No other locations are assigned to this requisition currently. Additional compensation for this role may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.
• PayPal does not charge candidates any fees for courses, applications, resume reviews, interviews, background checks, or onboarding. When making an application directly, we will never ask you to share passwords, one-time passcodes (OTP), or verification codes. Any such request is a red flag and likely part of a scam. All communication regarding your application will come from official PayPal email domains. If you suspect fraudulent activity, please report it immediately. To learn more about how to identify and avoid recruitment fraud please visit https://careers.pypl.com/contact-us.
• For the majority of employees, PayPal's balanced hybrid work model offers 3 days in the office for effective in-person collaboration and 2 days at your choice of either the PayPal office or your home workspace, ensuring that you equally have the benefits and conveniences of both locations.
• Our Benefits:
• At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. And we can’t do this without our most important asset-you. That’s why we offer comprehensive, choice-based programs, to support all aspects of personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial—delivering meaningful value where it matters most. We strive to create a flexible, balanced work culture with a holistic approach to benefits, including generous paid time off, healthcare coverage for you and your family, and resources to create financial security and support your mental health.
• No other locations are assigned to this requisition currently.
• Additional compensation for this role may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.

Who We Are: