Design Lead

About the Role

Malaa is seeking a Design Lead to join its team in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This full-time role is responsible for overseeing the product design function, encompassing standards, systems, processes, and team development. The Design Lead will be actively involved in design work while also providing direction, setting quality benchmarks, and establishing design systems and practices to enhance product development efficiency and coherence.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the quality standards for all customer-facing screens, ensuring clarity, trustworthiness, and simplicity for a regulated financial product.
• Develop and maintain a unified design system across mobile, web, and internal tools using Figma, ensuring alignment with engineering implementation.
• Manage and develop design team members, including setting goals, providing feedback, supporting growth, and conducting one-on-one meetings.
• Establish and optimize the design process to ensure efficient request, prioritization, and delivery of design work across the product function.
• Lead discovery and prototyping efforts, creating clickable prototypes quickly, testing them with customers, and using evidence to inform design decisions.
• Identify and remove redundant flows, inconsistent components, or outdated screens each quarter to streamline the product.
• Design regulated flows such as onboarding, KYC, disclosures, risk warnings, and consent, collaborating with compliance to ensure an effortless user experience.

Collaboration and Workflow

Product and engineering teams at Malaa operate as a single unit with a unified planning model. Product managers are paired with engineering squads, and design resources are shared across these squads. Priorities and capacity are determined weekly, with every initiative documented and designed before development. The Design Lead participates in weekly forums, manages design capacity across squads, and ensures design readiness for engineering needs.

Working Approach

• Demonstrate concepts through prototypes or marked-up screens rather than presentations.
• Work closely with engineers to review implementations against designs and resolve discrepancies directly.
• Document design decisions and their rationale to ensure clarity and prevent revisiting past discussions.
• Maintain high design standards in collaboration with product managers and engineers.
• Engage regularly with users and analyze product data using tools like Mixpanel and session recordings.

Qualifications and Experience

• 2-5 years of experience in product design.
• Proficiency in AI design and prototyping tools alongside Figma.
• Ability to develop clickable prototypes rapidly.
• Experience working directly with engineers on implementation.

Application Process

Interested candidates should submit their portfolio, including an in-depth example of a product or flow they owned. This example should detail the problem, decisions made, what shipped, and the resulting impact. Prototypes built by the applicant are welcome. Applications will be reviewed promptly.