Staff / Principal Product Designer, Design Systems . Rho

About this role

Staff / Principal Product Designer, Design Systems

Rho

NYC

Company size not listed

Full-timeLate Career (9+ years)Design Systems

About this role

About Us Rho is the modern banking platform built for the AI era. Startups and growth-stage companies can open accounts in minutes, issue cards, manage expenses, pay bills, and close the books – all in one connected platform backed by real human support. Rho — New York (in person) Rho is building the best business banking platform on earth. Not "one of." The best. We're looking for a Staff or Principal Product Designer to own our design system, the governed, in code foundation that everything we ship stands on. This is not a role where you maintain a Figma library and file tickets. This is the role where you define the frontend layer of a financial operating system that companies trust with their money. It's a long post on purpose. We'd rather you know exactly what this is before you apply. What you'd actually own Our design system is becoming the governed frontend layer of the product, components in code, rules enforced through lint and CI, documentation an AI agent can query and build against on spec. You would own that. The architecture, the tokens, the primitives, the motion language, the governance, the contribution model, and the standards that let 80 plus engineers and PMs ship on bar without a designer babysitting every pixel. You'll partner with our frontend guild, our engineers, and the design team as genuine equals, not as a service desk. You'll decide what a component is, how it behaves, how it moves, what it enables, and where it must not bend. You'll set the craft bar for the entire org and then build the system that makes hitting that bar the path of least resistance. Who this is for You've been doing this for a while. We mean it, at least 7 years of product design experience, with real design systems ownership at scale. Not "contributed to a design system." Owned one. Built one. Governed one. Watched it get abused and fixed the governance so it couldn't happen again. You are the kind of person who:

• Designs in code, or is hungry to. You believe Figma is not the build environment, and that designing in the real medium eliminates a whole category of hidden QA cost. If the phrase "design engineer" makes you lean forward, hi.
• Has genuine taste and a serious bar for it. Branding, typography, motion, microinteractions: you sweat all of it. You have opinions about easing curves and you can defend them. A transition that feels half a beat off bothers you until it's fixed.
• Owns your craft, doesn't inherit it. You can point at a visual language and say "I built that," not "that was set before I got there and I adjusted the fonts."
• Builds systems, not screens. You think in primitives, states, edge cases, and two-way doors. When something breaks at a thousand users, you already designed for it.
• Ships, then sharpens. You move fast, you work out loud, you share the messy middle instead of disappearing for three weeks and returning with a monument. Perfect but late is a fail here.
• Has low ego and high standards at the same time. You hold a firm craft bar and you genuinely want the critique. You defend decisions with reasoning, not with "it's my stylistic choice."
• Gets the domain, or is dying to. Financial workflows are dense, multi-role, permission scoped, and unforgiving. You find that fun, not frightening. Who this is NOT for A few honest filters, to save us both time. Do not apply to this role if you are junior. This is a Staff/Principal position. If you're earlier in your career, we'd genuinely love to meet you, we just want you in the right process. Apply for our product designer role instead: https://www.rho.co/careers/f4ece49b-3b53-4ffb-861f-9cc972c10b27 It's also probably not your fit if:
• Your portfolio is process decks, tiny mockups, and journey maps, and the actual UI is nowhere to be found. We evaluate craft at the pixel level. If we can't see it, we can't hire it.
• Your idea of a design system is a color palette and a component library nobody governs.
• Motion and micro interactions are afterthoughts to you rather than part of the craft.
• You need a fully specced ticket before you can move, and ambiguity makes you freeze.
• You want to be handed the vision. We want someone who brings one.
• "Move fast" reads to you as "lower the quality bar." Here it means the opposite, the bar is high AND the pace is high, and the system you build is how those two coexist.
• You lead with an AI chatbot case study. We love AI and use it every day. But a conversational UI is not a demonstration of end-to-end product craft. How we work Small pods. Artifact first. Designers own their surfaces end to end, including research, QA, and the fight to get it shipped right. We use AI natively and expect you to. The design team is heads down on building the governed frontend layer this quarter, and this role is central to it. We're in the office in New York because the best systems work happens shoulder to shoulder, obsessing over a real screen. The bar Restraint over decoration. Confidence over noise. Interfaces that feel calm because someone sweated every detail so the user never has to, and that feel alive because the motion is considered, not bolted on. We care about how money moving feels, how a card creation confirms, how a state transition lands. If "it looks fun, but does it do anything" is a question you ask yourself unprompted, you'll fit right in. How to apply If you've read this far and you're already thinking about how you'd architect our token layer, we should talk. Come ready to do two things when we meet, walk us through a real, working file (not just the polished case study frames), and show us a design system you actually built and governed. Bring one deeply complex, systems level project and one piece you're proud of at the pixel level, and tell us plainly which decisions were yours.