Senior Product Designer, Operations Tools - Alpaca

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered, global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure for stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, fixed income, 24/5 trading, and more.

Amongst our subsidiaries, Alpaca is a licensed financial services company, serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with our institutional-grade APIs. This includes broker-dealers, investment advisors, wealth managers, hedge funds, and crypto exchanges, totalling over 10 million brokerage accounts.

Our global team is a diverse group of 400+ experienced engineers, traders, and brokerage professionals working across the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, the UK, and beyond. Alpaca is backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier global investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Social Leverage, and Y Combinator.

The Role (12-Month Contract)

We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer to design and build internal tools for complex financial operations. This is a hands-on role for someone who can move fluidly between user research, systems design, AI prototyping, and production code.

You’ll partner with product, engineering, and operations to turn complicated workflows, business rules, and technical constraints into intuitive, reliable tools. You should be comfortable working independently—from identifying the problem through shipping and iterating on a production solution.

What You’ll Do

• Own the end-to-end design process: Lead projects from research and workflow discovery through prototyping, validation, detailed design, implementation, and post-launch iteration.
• Design complex operational workflows: Build tools involving multiple user roles, data sources, business rules, approvals, exceptions, and audit requirements.
• Build AI-powered prototypes: Rapidly create functional prototypes for alignment across multiple stakeholders.
• Turn prototypes into production experiences: Write and contribute code within production environments, working through code review, testing, deployment, and iteration.
• Champion operational users: Understand the needs and constraints of financial operations teams through interviews, observation, workflow analysis, and usability testing.
• Apply systems-level thinking: Design data-rich interfaces that help users monitor activity, investigate issues, manage exceptions, and make informed decisions.
• Collaborate with engineering: Work comfortably within engineering processes, helping push production code into the front end.
• Contribute to the design system: Create scalable patterns for tables, forms, dashboards, alerts, approvals, audit histories, and AI-assisted interactions.
• Execute independently: Manage multiple initiatives while clearly communicating progress, risks, dependencies, and decisions.

Who You Are

• 6+ years of experience in product design in startup or other fast-paced environments.
• Experience designing and launching tools in complex or technical industries (financial services, healthcare, infrastructure, logistics, manufacturing, etc.).
• Comfortable reading and building with API documentation.
• Skilled at translating complicated processes, data, business rules, and edge cases into clear experiences with auditability and regulatory compliance in mind.
• Ability to work independently, establish structure in ambiguous environments, and advance projects without extensive oversight.
• Clear communicator across product, engineering, operations, and business stakeholders.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options
• Health Benefits
• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500
• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card