Lead Product Designer

at Elayne — Estate settlement, from verified discovery to distribution

New York, NY, USFull-time6+ years$150K - $220KYC-S24

What the role involves

About The Role

We're looking for a Lead Product Designer to join our design team and own major parts of the product end to end.

This is a seat for someone with the craft, taste, perspective, and judgment of a design leader as well as the instincts of a great teammate. You'll set direction for the surfaces you own rather than wait for a spec, and you'll raise the bar for everyone around you. You influence what to build, design it, and see it shipped.

Why this role is different

We're hiring a Lead Product Designer to own major parts of the product end to end. This is a seat for someone with the craft, perspective, and judgment of a design leader. You'll set direction for the surfaces you own rather than wait for a spec. You influence what to build, design it, and see it shipped.

You should be meticulous about building simple flows out of incredibly complex processes: how one step connects to the next, what state the user is in at every point, where they get stuck, and what happens at each branch, handoff, and edge case. And you should be relentless about the user's voice: what a grieving family actually feels, where the process confuses or saddens them, and what they need to see in the hardest moments.

This role works closely with Product, Engineering, and Growth. As we scale, it can grow into Head of Design.

What you'll own

As Elayne's Lead Product Designer, you will turn complex, emotionally loaded problems into product experiences families can trust.

  • End-to-end flows for the surfaces you own

You will design complete journeys, not screens in isolation: the entry point, every branch and state, the error and edge cases, the empty states, and the handoffs to AI or human support. You own how it feels start to finish.

  • Trust around legal and financial complexity

You will design how Elayne explains money, legal authority, and institutional process to people who are overwhelmed. You will decide what to surface, what to simplify, and how to make unfamiliar, high-stakes concepts feel safe and clear.

  • The role of AI in the experience

You will define where AI should lead the user, where it should work quietly in the background, and where a human needs to be present. You will design the patterns that make automated help feel trustworthy rather than uncanny.

  • The system that lets quality scale

Over time, you will build and steward the design language, components, and patterns that let Elayne grow without losing craft or consistency. You will raise the bar for how the whole team designs.

What we're looking for

5 or more years designing and shipping product end to end, ideally for consumer or complex product surfaces where the experience, not just the interface, was your responsibility.

Mastery of interaction and systems design. You think in flows, states, and edge cases, and you obsess over the connective tissue between screens, not just the screens themselves.

Strong product judgment. You can set direction without a spec, understand priorities make the call on what to build and why, and defend it with reasoning rooted in the user, not in trends.

A track record of working from the user's actual voice, translating real behavior and real confusion into design decisions rather than designing for an imagined ideal user.

At least one experience at a Seed-stage or Series A company, where systems are still being built, priorities shift quickly, and speed matters more than perfection.

How we work

We are a small, high-trust team. We care deeply about the people we serve, but we are not precious about process. We move very quickly, communicate directly, and hold a high bar for the quality of the experience we deliver.

The work here is highly collaborative. The best ideas often come from being close to the details: a family conversation, a product gap, an operational edge case, or a partner need. We expect people to take ownership of outcomes, pull in the right teammates, and turn what they learn into better systems for everyone.

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About Elayne

Elayne is building the modern estate settlement platform. Estate settlement is a $250B+ annual market, with $80T+ in assets expected to transfer over the next 25 years. But after a death, families and executors have to spend 400+ hours manually identifying, organize, and distribute everything that was left behind like: financial accounts, debts, property, insurance, legal documents, incorporating juristidi ation requirements and family context. Elayne is the first platform to surface verified assets and debts for precisely this moment, then turing our discovery into a clear inheritance map. We work directly with families and executors, and with the partners who support them: funeral homes, hospice and aftercare providers, attorneys, and financial institutions. The company was founded by Adria, a former large-cap investor who experienced the problem firsthand, and Rebecca, a repeat fintech and mental health founder who left her master’s program in psychology at Harvard to launch Elayne. Together, they bring financial rigor, technical execution, and lived empathy to a massive but deeply human category. Backed by Y Combinator and Accel, we are now an 8-person team based in NYC.

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