Director of Design

About Us

Propel builds technology that strengthens the social safety net in America. We envision a future where every American has the tools and resources they need to thrive.

The safety net's strength depends not just on funding, but delivery. Propel exists to dramatically improve how government benefits are delivered. Managing SNAP benefits, picking a D-SNP plan, or protecting against EBT theft should feel as seamless as Apple Pay or Netflix.

Governments struggle to build modern, scalable user experiences. We don't.

Over 5 million Americans trust Propel today. We've grown revenue 35% YoY and are reinventing entire benefit categories, including Medicare, around the real needs of low-income Americans. We're building a high-growth, high-ceiling, sustainable for-profit company where impact drives revenue.

The Role

Propel's mission is to improve how government benefits are delivered and help low-income Americans strengthen their financial health. Millions of households use our app to check an EBT balance, track a SNAP deposit, protect their benefits from theft, or choose a Medicare plan, and they should get an experience that is fast, dignified, and worthy of the stakes. Most software built for these families falls short of that.

Closing the gap is our market opportunity, and it gives design unusual leverage: much of the work is turning rules written for administrators into something the people they govern can understand and act on.

We're looking for a Director of Design with strong taste who can tie design decisions to revenue, retention, and company priorities, and who will define what design means at an AI-native company. This person will report to our Head of Product and be a core member of EPD leadership.

Here's how you'll impact the company:

Lead a senior, autonomous design team.

You'll lead a team of seven designers, five of them at Staff or Principal level, with backgrounds at Figma, Facebook, Uber, and Duolingo. The team covers product design, content design, and design research, so you'll work across the full range of how users experience Propel. You'll own the team's coaching, growth, performance, and hiring. You'll own our design rituals, and build on them rather than inherit them.

With a team this experienced, you will need to ensure your bar for craft and judgement stay high, so your feedback is specific and useful to the team.

Make the case for design debt and get it paid down.

You’ll define why it matters to our users and the business, decide which pieces are worth fixing first, and build the support to get them done. That means making the tradeoffs clear enough that product and engineering leads choose to invest, and finding ways to make progress that don’t depend only on other teams giving up roadmap time.

Improve our product development process.

Collaborate with product and engineering leadership to improve organizational decision-making. We want a divergent thinker who challenges our frameworks, systems, and roadmaps productively, and who pushes them to be bolder, more user-centric, and more modern. You should be willing to step outside the design lane when doing so improves collective outcomes.

Redefine design as an AI-native function

. You will answer the questions we are all asking right now: what the design process looks like when prototyping is nearly free, where Figma still earns its place, and how an increasing number of people shipping code means we still make strong and consistent design decisions. This requires a real point of view on how leading consumer companies are deploying AI and where Propel should sit relative to that edge.

Make Propel a premium experience that moves metrics.

Visual design, copy, information architecture, consistency, and loading latency all count, and each one is the difference between a person understanding their benefits and giving up on the screen. You will raise all of it in ways that ladder to our near and medium term business objectives.

Requirements

• Experience managing a product design team at a consumer software startup, or a scaled pro-sumer startup
• Has worked at the staff or principal IC product designer level in the last 3 years
• Has managed a team of at least five designers, including hiring, performance management, and promotions
• Fluency in consumer software patterns: growth loops, churn and retention, behavior-based monetization, and A/B testing
• A considered perspective on what AI-native design practice looks like, and evidence that you are actively developing it
• Working knowledge of LLMs, code generation, and generative design tools, developed through your own use of them rather than secondhand
• The ability to tie design work to company strategy at a company with many competing priorities and finite resources
• Exceptional organization, and strength as both a writer and a speaker, particularly on project plans and strategic concepts
• Composure when priorities shift. Both the roadmap and the tooling underneath it are changing quickly, and a plan made this quarter may not survive the next one.
• Bonus points for The ability to still do the work yourself when it matters, as a capable IC product designer
• Design experience with native Android and iOS apps
• Work on a product used by millions of people
• Having managed content design, user research, or brand and visual design in addition to product design
• Experience with government programs or safety net services
• Prior experience on a leadership team
• Why take this job
• The social safety net is in the midst of a generational challenge, and it is one where design carries unusual leverage. Much of the question is how to simplify complex rules so that people can navigate government bureaucracy in their own best interests.
• You are inheriting a pedigreed, mission-motivated, senior-leaning team that is highly autonomous, conscientious, and experienced.
• Propel blends maturity with startup attitudes. We have twelve years of tenure and operate profitably, and we are still reinventing ourselves around AI leverage and creativity.
• This role may not be for you if
• You want craft investment justified on its own terms. We have picked a difficult business problem, which is building a venture-scale company on free software for the poorest Americans. That requires us to be inventive about our revenue model as well as our product, and we need to see the connection between design work and business outcomes on some timeline.
• You prefer a settled operating model. We are fully committed to reinventing ourselves, and design specifically, as an AI-native organization. We have made real progress this year and expect to keep adapting, which requires careful change management and clear thinking.
• At Propel, you'll enjoy
• Meaningful work and a strong shared sense of mission